A Connecticut Yankee in the Archon's Court
by BishoujoHelper
Summary: A molehole between a world very close to ours, and that of the Alliance for Democracy and Domination of the Draka, not long before the start of the Final War in 1998.
1. Foreword

"A Connecticut Yankee in the Archon's Court"

Foreword

This is a "fanfic" novel (incomplete at present) set in the Draka universe of S.M. Stirling, who has not specifically approved it yet. Some personal information provided has been altered from that of real people. Prior knowledge of " _The Stone Dogs_ " story and the entire Domination of the Draka timeline will vastly increase your enjoyment of the following.

The story here is speculation on shifting an American from a world close to ours into the world of the "Alliance for Democracy" and "Domination of the Draka" just before the Final War in 1998 as portrayed in Stirling's novel " _The Stone Dogs_." I deliberately modified some details from our world, although it's not a very sturdy alternate history, and made up a bunch about the Domination/Alliance world; for example, that the Alliance uses a Canadian/British postal code system of alternating numbers and letters. Some details that I created about the Alliance/Domination timeline and Frank's world are discussed in footnotes to each chapter. As author of this fanfic, I made decisions about how some things happened in the world of the Domination of the Draka and Alliance for Democracy, without consulting S.M. Stirling. If there's heartburn with them, you know who to complain to – me! Should S.M. Stirling disagree with me, I'll be happy to change things to conform to The Author's vision, so don't get too attached to what I say below. And I'll endeavor to fit this story within " _The Stone Dogs_ ," so don't go reading this looking for the Draka to lose the Final War.

Writing this text over 16 years after the rest, I vaguely recall getting something like "sure, why not" from S.M. Stirling regarding my extension to Lefarge and Stoddard's meeting in the book. Similarly, I got tacit permission – I submitted it for review by a security office, asked several weeks later and was told that it wasn't disallowed – for what's in the first few chapters referring to American military operations while I was still employed by the Air Force at AFOTEC.

You can easily guess who Frank Carson and his family are based on. But Lucia Garcia is a composite of a real USAF Master Sergeant and a civilian, using part of a third person's name. "Mechanic's Union" is based on a real school in New York City that charges no tuition to the few students that it accepts. In general, lots of details are deliberately altered from our reality. So yes, this is a "Mary Sue," but I hope to avoid the worst aspects of that.

All the chapter titles so far are references to Shawn Colvin songs. Quotes in the introductions of chapters are believed to be in the public domain or were created for this work.

Disclaimer: The Domination of the Draka, Alliance for Democracy, Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, Drakon, and associated characters, alternate history, technology, organizations and situations are copyright © S.M. Stirling and may not be used or reproduced commercially without permission. The use of these characters, organizations, history, situations and places are not to be construed as challenge to said copyright. The author of this "fanfic" is obtaining no profit or monetary income from providing it to you.


	2. Prologue

Prologue

 _Moleholes are inherently chaotic, even those brought to macrocosmic levels for a known purpose by the careful application of power. They have rarely been observed to behave unstably even when no detectable variation in initial conditions was observed, and identical expansion protocols were followed. While remote interference by Samothracians cannot be ruled out, it is quite possible that these potential gateways across our own universe are unpredictably interacting with similar moleholes in alternate space-time continua. Some number of unexplained historical occurrences involving sudden appearances or disappearances might be caused by such phenomena.  
_ unpublished notes, 442 F.S. (AD 2442)  
Tolya Mkenni d'Rohm, Reichart Station, Technical Directorate, Domination of the Draka footnote 1

Kirtland Air Force Base  
Albuquerque, New Mexico  
United States of America  
Western Bloc  
Friday March 27, AD 1998  
11:42 AM

"Warrior Fridays" was the military's response to the "dress-down Fridays" in more and more commercial establishments across the country, but it gave Frank Carson vague feelings of uneasiness to wear jeans and a "lumberjack" shirt to work even when it was permitted. At his previous job working for the Navy out at the remote China Lake weapons testing range, Frank had worn jeans every day, like all the other engineers, unless somebody important was visiting. But here, with a Major General in charge of the Air Force Operational Testing & Evaluation Center – everybody abbreviated that mouthful to AFOTEC – headquarters at Kirtland, somebody important was always around. Even on a Friday with nothing on his appointment calendar, it wouldn't be unusual to be summoned to some Colonel's office or even the Technical Director's presence with no notice. That had happened two days before; finding a small note on his chair after coming in a few minutes late, and ending up in a day-long classified meeting in a small shielded room until almost 6 at night. So, while on Fridays the military personnel got to wear their camos or flight suits or whatever strange uniform they were authorized to wear from a previous assignment, civilians wore what they felt comfortable with. Frank Carson wore what he could quickly grab from the clean laundry pile, and hoped nobody would think he was a slob if he got called into a meeting with no notice. He usually wore the same clothes the next day. Weekends were often spent taking care of little Nicky and trying to keep the inquisitive 15 month-old boy out of trouble while his wife Anne worked one of her oddly-timed shifts at the airport.

This morning Frank was on a rare walk across the base, now heading back to his office after turning in a pile of paperwork to get reimbursed for his latest travel for the government. Las Vegas was a strange place to visit for anyone. Frank's work out there required riding an unmarked bus from a nondescript terminal building, far from the glamour of the Strip. The buses went to and from a place that nobody in the U.S. government would officially admit existed, but numerous people on the outside called Area 31. Some of them thought the government had UFOs there, or met aliens to plot further outrages against humanity, and tended to believe in alien abductions and massive conspiracies. Frank knew what went on at a small part of Area 31, but he'd never seen anything more alien than a British RAF Air Commodore's handlebar mustache while out there. footnote 2 With the security restrictions about talking of work matters on the bus, unless you already knew somebody, you were reduced to banal platitudes, reading a book or looking out the window at the desolation going by for several hours each way. A plane service to the remote sections of the test range north of Las Vegas would have made sense, but Frank's work was never quite out that far, distance-wise. And since his contacts at the range never mentioned a plane, Frank never asked. That's the way it was in the murky realms of compartmented security — don't ask and don't tell, you never know what somebody else is cleared for unless introduced by somebody both of you know. With all the various things Frank had been cleared for, or "read out of" after doing his job, he sometimes wasn't sure what he was allowed to tell anybody anymore. There were just too many test programs using classified assets and procedures, and perhaps some of the secrecy was just to conceal that the assets and procedures weren't that good. That the incompetence was classified appealed to his cynicism and vicious sense of humor.

His work on designing and testing radar jammers had brought him from a defense contractor job right out of college, to working in the civil service for the Navy for several years, and now almost 2 years with the Air Force. So far, mild incompetence seemed to be pervasive, when security could conceal lapses in judgment and the spigot of defense spending was still wide open regardless of which party's man sat in the Oval Office. Frank's occasional flashes of brilliance made him a commodity in demand within the military-industrial complex. He was still a young engineer on his way up, almost at the cusp of the "engineer or manager" decision that would shape the rest of his career.

Anyway, the chance to walk in the open air for a few minutes was welcome. At least, when cars and trucks weren't roaring by on the streets of the base. Maybe it had been the lower altitude at China Lake, or the strict California anti-pollution laws, but vehicles in Albuquerque noticeably stank to Frank, even after two years in New Mexico. Diesels especially bothered him; just a whiff of exhaust would start him toward nausea. That made taking boat trips for scuba diving an interesting exercise in watching the wind to see which way the smoke was blowing. Sometimes he had to balance staying below decks and slowly getting seasick against standing on the open deck with a chance of tossing his cookies for another reason. But no diving in New Mexico, unless you counted the local aquarium to clean the glass. It hadn't been much easier in the middle of the Mojave Desert before, but at least China Lake had been a few hours' drive away from the coast so he could get to Ventura harbor quick enough. Nowadays, diving was only a rare treat on vacation or long government travel to coastal locations. It was always a draining experience before he got in the water, making sure you had all the necessary equipment and it was all in working order, and having to check your buddy as well. But once under the surface, and the proper adjustments made to buoyancy, all the cares of the upper world dissolved. Under the sea, Frank found peace and the closest thing yet to his rare flying dreams. In those, he could zoom and twist and explore with no more than a thought. Diving was a lot like that, except for having to also pay attention to breathing and watching out for your own safety and that of your buddy in the alien undersea world. Returning to the surface, the increased weight once out of the water's embrace was accompanied by all the cares of the upper world. Job, family, and all the other worries that kept him awake some nights. A mental load in addition to the physical one. Wouldn't it be nice to stay underwater forever?

Frank's body was on automatic pilot, his stream of consciousness darting from subject to subject like a hummingbird, as he walked back to his office. With no more papers in his hands, having dropped it all off at the travel voucher counter, he was distracted from the thoughts that flitted through his head only by the brightness of the sunny spring day and the pre-lunch rumbling of his stomach.

A quick glance at his watch to confirm the time, and Frank estimated that Anne, his wife, would be either at home now, or leaving her job at the airport any minute. The people who ran the base's child care for the military and civilians were very particular about having a contact number in case of emergencies. Frank made a habit of always leaving his office number first. After that, Anne's work schedule was so variable that the order of her work number and their home number changed on a daily basis, depending on when she would return home. If anything happened to little Nicky, the child care center was sure to call somebody, and they got upset if parents weren't available to take a child home or authorize medical treatment immediately. So, Frank hoped that Anne's bosses at the airport hadn't asked her to stay late again. Anne hated getting up early in the morning when her schedule called for it, but she was still a pushover for helping out and staying past 8 hours on the clock. Frank had gotten used to taking care of Nicky, their only child so far, if he was the only parent around in the morning or evening. Odds were, nothing serious would happen to Nicky on any given day at the child care center. But at 15 months, Nikolaus Andrew was an active little boy with only a few months' experience at walking, and prone to bumping into things or getting hit or bit by other kids in the room. Frank thought Nicky gave as good as he got, but the child care workers thought children at that age didn't know hitting others was bad, and just did it accidentally. After seeing his son scramble away several times after picking up something he shouldn't, looking back to see if he was being chased, Frank thought that toddlers really did know right and wrong at some instinctual level, but they wanted attention more. The people that thought little ones were no trouble obviously hadn't had to watch them for very long, or hadn't had an active boy like Nicky on their hands.

Frank approached the two-story building that housed his office. It was one of the oldest buildings on the base, built late in World War II when the Air Force had still been part of the Army, and had recently served as the base personnel office. That is, until a new personnel building was built two blocks away just last year, and AFOTEC had moved some people into this one while renovating some of their own similarly old buildings nearby. The way military funding worked, it was often easier to renovate an old building like the Pentagon several times than get a new one built. The Navy had a sneaky way around that by constructing small buildings for just under the oversight threshold, then connecting them with covered walkways. The Air Force renovated instead, or put people in rented buildings outside the base and then complained that they needed new ones built to avoid the rental and mileage expenses.

The quickest way to Frank's specific office from this direction was to climb an outside staircase, open wider the heavy emergency exit door that had been propped partially open, and walk a few feet down the narrow central hallway towards his office. The downstairs back entrance with its brand-new security sensor, which only required waving his badge within a few inches of the wall plate, was around the corner of the building, and Frank wanted to save a few steps. The upstairs doors at the north and south ends of the building were often propped open in violation of security rules during the workday, because even in early spring the building got terrifically hot inside. Most of the problem was that the heat ran full blast from mid-November on until somebody was allowed to turn on the inadequate cooling system in June, regardless of the local weather. Just one of the reasons the personnel folks had gotten a new building built, but his agency wasn't considerate enough about their people to do anything about it yet. There had been a renovation a few years ago that had put a new outside surface on the building, and replaced the original outside staircases. But even with new modular cubicles and office furniture inside, the wartime heritage was still visible in the low ceilings and antiquated electrical wiring.

The new outside stairs were two flights separated by a small landing, with tubular steel railings and a black non-skid surface on the treads. They sprang from a large and crack-free concrete pad connected to a wheelchair ramp that led towards the street. How handicapped people would get up the stairs was unclear to Frank. Perhaps they were supposed to go around the corner of the building, and take another wheelchair ramp down a few inches to the level of the downstairs entrance at the back of the building. The back door was the only official entrance for now. Maybe someday the deep hole that blocked access to the front door would be filled in. Nobody in AFOTEC seemed to know why it was there in the first place, or could get the base civil engineers to commit to a schedule for filling it.

Suddenly, as Frank put a foot up on the lowest step of the outside staircase, a searing wave of pain began in his lower back. The same kind of pain that had made him unable to walk for several hours last Saturday; a muscle spasm, almost certainly a result of several minor car accidents and heavy lifting incidents in earlier years. The only thing to do was tolerate the pain, and carefully move to a place where he could take his medication and wait it out. Somehow, sitting in the car for over two hours had worked the last time. But it had been a hellish walk from the store across the parking lot to get there, even with his wife and a store clerk supporting him. Unfortunately, now Frank was two flights of stairs from his office or a long walk to his car in a distant parking lot. He had taken to leaving his wallet and his keys in his jacket pockets to avoid the imbalance to his back while walking with things in his pants pockets, especially with relatively tight jeans on. But on such a nice day, after the morning chill was gone, he had left the jacket hung up in his office. All he carried in his pants pockets was a few coins and a comb. A dosage of his pain medication was wrapped up in a tissue in his shirt pocket. His identification badge hung from a plastic strap around his neck, it was enough to get him on the base or into the secured areas he was cleared for.

Frank froze in place, hoping the pain would fade away of its own accord, or was caused by something he'd done earlier while walking. But with one leg up on a step, his back and now his raised leg were becoming sources of excruciating agony. Frank grabbed the handrails, and tried to push himself back from the stairs. Getting as much of his weight onto his arms as possible had helped last time… But the pain flared even brighter as his raised foot started to drag backwards off the step. His last sensations were of falling backwards from the stairs, his arms beginning to swing wide in a trivial attempt to break his fall. A nova of agony, and unconsciousness was a blessed relief. Autonomic responses pulled his body up on one side into a semblance of a fetal curl, with the continuing pain provoking nervous twitches of his arms and legs, trying to minimize the agony.

A bright flash came from a midair source, and a crack of thunder boomed in the space near the bottom of the stairs, but Frank was unable to perceive them in his unconscious state. An opaque white sphere several meters across, and enclosing his entire body although not centered on it, momentarily appeared and then popped out of existence like a burst soap bubble. The curves where the sphere had intersected the ground and the stairs glowed bright red. They traced a circle at ground level, enclosing an area of cracked concrete slightly lower than the outside. Inside the circle, a construction of wood and metal looking like the bottom of an old flight of stairs stood for a second, then collapsed. It was soon buried by the collapse of the upper part of the outside stairs, which no longer had all of the supports they were designed for.

The people attracted to the scene by the noise were more interested in the body parts than the stairs debris. Two disembodied arms and a portion of one leg, all dressed in a camouflage outfit, lay in a heap just inside the edge of the circle on the ground, along with the toe of a black boot. One hand still clutched a flashlight, the other a small two-way "walkie-talkie" radio with the antenna extended. Smoke rose from the cut edges of fabric and flesh, and the edge of the circle. A wooden sawhorse stood just inside the edge of the circle, next to the pile of mixed staircase debris that now covered a wide area both inside and outside the circle. A small cardboard sign tacked to the sawhorse read "BUILDING CONDEMNED — DO NOT ENTER." While one joker in the onlookers commented that this was fast work indeed for the base's civil engineers, it hadn't been there earlier.

There turned out to have been no witnesses to the incident, even though it happened close to a busy street. There had been no traffic passing the area during those few seconds, and while the nearby buildings had a few windows with visibility of the area, but nobody recalled seeing anything unusual there before the noise. Over an hour later, an AFOTA head count revealed that Frank Carson was unaccounted for. But after removing the debris of the collapsed stairs, Frank's body wasn't found, nor any sign he had been there.

The site of the appearance event was quickly cordoned off by the base security squadron, but in just over three hours even they were evicted from the area by a group of people that arrived in unmarked vans. The team from the highly classified Lean Grass Monad Project collected all the physical evidence down to scrapings of the concrete, and quickly verified the area wasn't excessively radioactive or contaminated with hazardous chemicals. In their hidden laboratory situated on a remote part of Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, the entire collection of items and surface samples were analyzed for clues to the nature of the appearance event. The flashlight soon proved to be unexceptional technically, but the part numbers matched nothing known, and the manufacturer name stamped on the case best corresponded to a family-owned hardware store in Minnesota. The "walkie-talkie" also didn't correspond to any currently manufactured, and provided several technical enigmas. It was set to a narrow frequency band mostly allocated to commercial taxi dispatch, and used an analog scrambling mechanism to mix the signal between several portions of the band simultaneously; a duplicate receiver had to be built just to confirm that the device was working properly. The circuitry was also built using some strange materials, all available on Earth, but some showing evidence of being processed in zero or micro-gravity. After carefully sanitizing their findings, the LGM Project let the theory behind the radio circuitry flow out through a briefing to a select group of defense contractors about 18 months after the incident occurred. The advanced analog techniques were thus eventually exploited by the wider defense community of the Western Bloc, but using digital conversion processing, giving them a momentary minor advantage in the constant struggle with the Eastern Bloc. However, the room-temperature superconductor material found in the radio's circuitry eventually caused the LGM Project to be disbanded, as nobody outside it could believe that the technology hadn't come from UFOs. After a well-intentioned leak to the press by a believer in alien abductions, the resulting widespread media interest compromised the project's secrecy. And that the Eastern Bloc had full knowledge of the superconductor within days of the project's classified report to the President was the tip of yet another iceberg. footnote 3

Fingerprint and DNA analysis of the uncharred bits of flesh found no match to any known persons, beyond a family resemblance to the DNA of a tribe in the Brazilian rain forest. No reports of any missing, injured, or dead persons matching the known injuries were received in the next year. The strange sawhorse and sign, concrete composition and elevation inside the circle, and materials of the stairs debris inside and outside the area were found to be different than what was used in the surrounding area and rest of the building, but normal other than the "cut" edges. The U.S. Air Force finally officially explained the incident as an isolated terrorist attack that caused minor structural damage and injured the terrorist when the bomb exploded prematurely. This even though no demands were received, no similar incidents occurred in the next few years, and the body parts never led to a person.

Frank Carson was listed as a missing person, but his disappearance from the base was deliberately not linked to the appearance at his building, and that investigation soon ran out of leads after family and friends provided nothing useful. Because of his security clearance, the government was easily convinced he had suddenly defected to the Eastern Bloc, and began another round of counter-intelligence work to head off any more damage. Frank's disappearance was never officially linked to the incident, although some in the LGM Project suspected he had gone to where the strange items had come from, and his "missing" status was officially changed to "missing, presumed dead" after the legally required time elapsed. The CIA strongly suspected he had defected to hand over his classified knowledge for a life of privilege behind the Iron Curtain, and patiently waited for some news to filter out of their sources in the Eastern Bloc, but none ever came. Anne Carson eventually gave up hope for Frank's return, although she told Nicky as he grew about "Daddy Frank who used to take care of you." Beyond some pictures taken when he was a baby and her words, the young boy grew up with no memories of his birth father. He learned to call Anne's second husband "Dada" and then "Dad." Life went on.

Footnotes:

1: Final Society (F.S.) dating is used by the Domination in " _Drakon_ ," " _anno Domini"_ (AD) is for reference by the rest of us. Tolya's speculations were kept on her transducer, and were of course copied and saved in remote storage by TechSec.

2: Some of the details about "Area 31" have been significantly altered, except for the Air Commodore's mustache.

3: The story " _Roachstompers_ " by S. M. Stirling appeared in the anthology " _Power_ " which he also edited, and " _New Destinies, Vol. VIII_ " (Baen 1989) as well. It shows how the introduction of working cold fusion into "our world" could easily cause all kinds of unintended havoc. A working room-temperature superconductor would equal some substantial fraction of that.


	3. Chapter 1: The Dead of the Night

Chapter 1: The Dead of the Night

 _Challenge everyone you don't recognize! Inconvenience now or give away the store?_  
Alliance for Democracy security awareness poster 72-4E, 1972 (available in Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi and Japanese as special order item)

 _"It's ratha funny, that the Yankees turned into the kinda paper-checkin' security tight-asses they made so much fun of the Nazis fo', all on account of us."_  
Cohortach Deanna Viljoen, Domination Embassy to United States, 1952

Sandia Air Base, Alliance Air Force  
Albuquerque, New Mexico  
United States of America footnote 1  
Alliance for Democracy  
27 March 1998  
2341 hours

Technical Master Sergeant footnote 2 Lucia Garcia peered in the grimy window, panned her flashlight around to illuminate the interior briefly, rattled the old doorknob to make sure the door was still locked, then turned to trudge down the ancient steps of the outside staircase. Her right hand began to point the flickering flashlight down at the stairs she was about to descend, and she reached for the railing closest to the building with her left for support in case one of the old boards broke. She was angry at the whole chain of command that had ordered her roused from bed, after a full duty day doing mainbrain computer administration and maintenance, to augment the base security forces for another night infiltration defense exercise. If she'd been posted to a foxhole or bunker on the base perimeter with an enlisted person or another NCO, she would have had a good chance of outranking them, and grabbing some more shuteye. But no. This time it was inspecting buildings, especially offices empty at night, looking for signs of forced entry. She was sure she wouldn't find anything, the whole thing tonight known to be a drill, but sometimes the higher-ups set up a simulated Draka infiltration just to keep you on your toes. And heaven help those who weren't on them. A Draka commando team, or even one Citizen, could ambush a weary Alliance soldier and carve them up in seconds. In fact, the barracks scuttlebutt was that these patrols by non-Security personnel were unarmed and given minimal equipment, just flashlights and a two-way radio, because Security didn't expect them to do anything more than fail to report in, because they had been killed, if they found a Snake. So none of the cermet armor, comm/sensor helmets, and Springfield-15 assault rifles that were issued to the base Security Force. Just fabric camouflage uniforms, flashlights and radios as if this were 50 or so years ago, and you could yell "Stop!" at a Snake and expect to be obeyed until the real soldiers arrived. The alternative would have been to train everybody in the Air Force in weapons and unarmed combat, and provide proper equipment to all of them for these security exercises. But the Alliance Air Force had to spend their money elsewhere, on aircraft and the facilities that kept them running, now that the Space Force got the lion's share of the funding and all the glamour. footnote 3

But the door there at the top of the stairs was secure. It was also so old and fragile that she could have opened it in a few seconds to a minute, depending on if she had wanted to leave marks of forced entry. A few years at an all-girl Catholic boarding school in Monterrey had given Lucia an education in some areas her parents hadn't intended: evading the patrolling nuns, picking locks, and rough-and-tumble catfighting with bullies using anything from sharp fingernails to broomsticks to knives. The view through the glass had shown an empty hallway, no lights and no recent footprints visible in a thick layer of dust. And she knew that this old building, once the base personnel office until a year ago, was vacant and due to be torn down soon. It dated back to sometime during the Eurasian War, when a huge amount of air-related activity had turned a large section of the countryside south of the city and east of the Rio Grande into a military base that still shared runways with the city's commercial airport. She had stepped around a wooden sawhorse blocking access to the base of the stairs before coming up here, a piece of cardboard tacked to the sawhorse reading "BUILDING CONDEMNED — DO NOT ENTER." She was sure only a madman would take a chance on the dangers within, but it would have been a perfect hideout within the base for infiltrators. The stairs seemed sturdy, but she was taking no chances on the ability of the old wooden treads to support even her 55-kilo footnote 4 frame.

As she turned away from the door, a bright light from ground level momentarily blinded her. The other member of her two-person team, a young Brazilian Captain, had been nothing but trouble, trying to "help" by pointing his flashlight wherever she went. Lucia was sure it was just so he could watch her rear move in the camouflage pants. She raised her right hand to shade her eyes, and started down the stairs without even the ability to see where her feet were going, cursing under her breath at the Brazilian, the Draka, and her decision to join the Alliance military 12 years earlier. "Join the Air Force and soar with the eagles indeed! _Estupido puta!_ " Her exhalation billowed out before her as white vapor in the cold night air. The Brazilian's voice began "Team Nine reporting in, completed inspection of…", speaking to the Base Security Force communications center over the two-way radio that he held.

Suddenly, the brilliance of the annoying flashlight was dwarfed by a sun-bright burst of light coming from the same general direction. Only Sergeant Garcia's shading hand kept her from being completely blinded as a momentary flash, accompanied by a loud "crack" like thunder next door, shattered the night's stillness. The stairs shook as if kicked by a giant. A short cry of agony came from below, maybe the Brazilian had been injured, but Lucia couldn't see for the next few seconds while spots danced before her eyes. She dropped her flashlight and clamped both hands on the L-shaped metal stair railing, determined to hold on even if the stairs collapsed, until she could see again and assess the situation. "Grenade?" flashed through her shocked brain, but she shook off that initial conclusion until she knew more. She began long slow blinks, hoping her vision would clear quickly. If it had been a grenade, it must have been a "flash-bang" one rather than fragmentation, for she felt no pain from fragment injuries. In fact, there had been no noticeable blast, just light and sound, and the shaking of the stairs hadn't been accompanied by anything across her body.

With a loud crash of bending metal and snapping wood, part of the stairs closer to the ground collapsed below her. As her vision began to clear, Sergeant Garcia could see a circular line of smoldering red glow about 3 meters across, near the original base of the stairs. There was a body-sized thing almost in the center of it, and something else about the same size, roughly where the Brazilian had been standing, at the edge of the red circle. A nearby streetlight and the faint red glow from the edge of the circle were the only visible light sources now. Her flashlight had apparently finally given out, and was probably one of the dark objects on the ground nearby. The flashlight held by the Brazilian – wherever he was now – wasn't shedding any light, which made her start another round of mumbled cursing about not getting help when it was really needed. The staircase seemed to have stopped shaking, and she was a good three meters up. But close enough to the ground to jump, though, given her physical training. She flexed her knees and jumped outward and off, making sure to avoid the pieces of metal strewn on the ground. Given the extra bounce from her jump, the stairs completed collapsing behind her.

Coming to her feet on the grass beyond the concrete near the building, Sergeant Garcia looked around for the hand-held radio the Brazilian had been carrying. As the senior member of the team, he had appropriated it, and the working flashlight, and told Lucia to walk in front of him at all times during this inspection. _Macho_ bastard, or whatever they called his obsolete attitude in the jungles of Brazil nowadays. But it was a reasonable and valid order nonetheless, and had to be obeyed. Even though she was sure he was doing it just to make her do all the work while he got to ogle her. If he weren't an officer, she'd have shaken that toothy grin off his face, and kneed him in the _cojones_ to show him she was no shy _señorita_ to be leered at.

She found and retrieved her inferior flashlight, but even after a few slaps it refused to operate. Only the nearby streetlight helped her see the scene, as the glow from the edge of the circle provided no real illumination. The body in the circle wasn't the Brazilian. In fact, that spot where the other dark thing was, it was about where he had been…

Lucia felt her gorge rise as she realized that the dark mass was most, but not all, of his body. It lay prone across part of the glowing red circle, as if he had fallen into it. From the camouflage jacket on the back, the markings on its shoulders, and the straight dark hair on the head, it was definitely the Brazilian captain. But both arms were gone, they just ended somewhere around the elbow. The good flashlight and the radio were nowhere in sight. Well, he had been holding both when it happened…

She turned over the corpse with a booted foot, and saw a look of surprise and pain on the Brazilian's frozen face, the last expression before the shock of losing limbs killed him. A faint stench of smoldering uniform fabric and charred flesh rose from the corpse, augmented now that she had turned him over onto his back. The edges of the arm wounds looked like charbroiled steak, extremely well done. A few glowing embers still lurked in the stumps, winking like evil little eyes. Faint wisps of white vapor – steam or smoke – drifted up and vanished into the cold night air. One foot seemed to end midway, and there was a divot taken out of that leg encompassing the knee. Apparently whatever had caused this circle of destruction… No, a hemisphere or even sphere partly in the ground, judging by the damage to the stairs… Maybe the other body in the middle of it held some answers.

She stepped away from the Brazilian's corpse, and turned to regard the hellish circle on the ground. The edge was still faintly glowing, but the reddish embers were winking out as time passed. The interior of the circle didn't look burnt, just the edge, and it was slightly raised above the rest of the concrete. Whatever had made the circle on the ground had cut through the stairs and the Brazilian, cutting both so they had collapsed. The circle contained a prone body, and crumpled metal pieces that could have been stairs too. The body in the circle was lying in a semi-fetal position on one side, the arms in front and hands opened as if grasping or trying to let go of something. No weapons visible. Civilian clothes, blue denim jeans footnote 5 and a green patterned flannel shirt, black tennis shoes, no hat on his head or visible nearby. Some kind of badge on a white string or strap around the neck, dark glasses covering the eyes, a small watch of gold and black on a black strap on the left wrist. Dark hair with streaks of gray, mustache and full lips, a man of medium height and slightly protruding belly. The gray made him look older at first glance, but probably in his late 30s and gone gray early, not in good physical shape. Definitely not a Draka or even a serf. She took a second look and murmured to herself "black tennis shoes?" The dark glasses began visibly clearing as she watched. The man's eyes were closed, but his face was contorted in pain. As she approached, he groaned and his legs and arms feebly flailed. But he stopped moving with another groan and slumped, still apparently unconscious while lying on his side.

Lucia's instincts to rush to somebody's aid were tempered by caution. Who was this stranger? There had been nobody else near the building when she had climbed the stairs. And the sawhorse she had stepped around was nowhere in sight. Deciding, she stepped back out of the circle and away towards the street. Real security troops should be arriving in the vicinity soon to investigate the interrupted radio call, and she wasn't qualified to render more than first aid, even if she had had a kit. No, she'd leave this mysterious stranger for somebody else. He probably hadn't killed the Brazilian officer, but he was in the center of what had, and that made him a hot potato. Not her responsibility, if she could avoid it.

But to be sure of her own safety, she carefully reached down her right leg and pulled up the pants slightly to expose the hidden knife sheath. While listening and peering about intently, she pulled the unauthorized knife out of the sheath, and held it at the ready before her. Then she slowly turned from side to side while backing toward the building wall. If this was some kind of infiltration simulation, it was a truly bizarre one that had gone deadly wrong, and who knew what else could happen. The dazed Technical Master Sergeant welcomed the sound of a light armored aircar approaching. She squinted, held up her left hand to shade her eyes, and slid her right hand around her back to conceal the knife, now that help was here. The searchlight beam swung around to illuminate her for a heartbeat, then fixed on the bizarre scene she stood near. An amplified male voice yelled "Security! Identify yourself!" from a speaker mounted on the aircar. Sergeant Garcia actually relaxed a bit, knowing that the questions were only starting, but at least now things would get taken care of by professionals.

Hospital of the Sacred Heart  
New York City  
Federal Capital District  
United States of America  
Alliance for Democracy  
February 7, 1998 footnote 6

The door closed behind Brigadier Frederick Lefarge, and he turned to walk away down the hospital hallway toward the elevator. A blue light mounted over the door to room A17, the room he'd just left the soon-to-be "late" General Stoddard in, began blinking. Several hospital personnel appeared out of a room halfway down the hall, one of them pushing a large cart loaded with even more medical equipment to add to that already surrounding the patient. They charged down the hallway at him, and he stepped aside to let them pass. The group skidded to a halt before the door marked by the light, and rushed inside. Lefarge sighed and resumed making his way out of the hospital. While he was certain their efforts were futile, that was the same dedication to life that had saved Cindy and the girls so many years ago, and he couldn't argue with it. He'd ask Donovan House later for information about the funeral. With Nate Junior out in the Belt, Fred Lefarge suspected that as a protégé of the General all these years, he himself was on the short list to give Nate Stoddard's eulogy. Fred was amazed that Nate Senior had held onto life long enough for a rare visit in-system from the Belt to pass on his warning, and then literally given up the ghost. Few enough reasons to stay on Earth for very long, one less now.

Room A17 had previously resembled a mechanical spider web, with a host of noisy medical machines surrounding the man in the bed. After the crash team arrived in response to the nurse's call, their frenzied activities looked like a multi-pronged assault on the machines and the body at the center. But after only a minute or so, activity momentarily halted at an announcement coming from a team member's two-way radio, "Knock it off, he's in the elevator."

The members of the medical team suddenly relaxed, and they began disconnecting lines and cables from the body at a relatively leisurely pace compared to their actions before. Stoddard's body suddenly jerked, and he cried out forcefully, "Ow! Careful how you're pulling on those, or you really _will_ kill me!"

The nurse who had first entered the room turned to the old man and cooed, "You've still got a few years left, Sir. But we have to get your face cleaned up, and you out of that bed, in the next few minutes or we won't fool anyone. Now hold still."

The man wearing the nametag "Dr. P. Suharto" directed two of the crash team in a singsong voice, "Now move those machines away, and it will be a lot easier to move the body from the bottom of the cart into the bed. Ah, I see we have the machine that goes bing!"

Stoddard lifted a wavering hand to momentarily push away the nurse removing makeup from his face, and grumbled, "That one's the worst. Nearly made me forget my lines, making that silly noise all the time. And get these damned shaking things off my hands!"

In a few minutes, the false medical team removed makeup and devices to transform Nate Stoddard from a man at death's door into a much healthier looking — but still ancient — old man. After helping him out of the bed, they pulled a body out of a compartment in the bottom of the crash cart, and placed it on the bed in Stoddard's place. The old man leaned over the corpse and whispered, "Sorry old-timer, but you were too good a match to pass up. I'm sure Fred will give you a lovely eulogy. Tell him that I'm sorry I had to… Nelson's eye patch…"

His voice faltered, and he quickly rubbed at his eyes, then straightened up and cleared his throat. He then turned to the others and barked, "You've put enough of my cloned hair and skin on this guy that samples taken from the open casket will have my DNA, right?"

One of Suharto's body movers wearily nodded and said, "It took hours, but it will fool anyone that doesn't do an autopsy."

Stoddard growled back, "Well, the fun is only beginning. Help me into that conjurer's box on wheels and let's get out of here before the real doctors show up to declare me dead. And be careful, because this is supposed to be the start of an enjoyable retirement, not the real death of me. You're all going to get sick of guarding me, but your only job for the OSS from now on is to keep me safe and a secret from everyone — including the rest of the OSS."

The team members signaled their assent in various ways, but Stoddard was too busy getting into the large empty compartment in the crash cart to notice. Command of and trust in his subordinates was second nature after all these years. He'd picked this team specifically for their abilities to pull off this melodrama and then safeguard him around the clock for however long he had left. A bit too late to second-guess the choices.

Footnotes:

1: Although the Alliance for Democracy merged sovereignty after the Indian Incident in 1976, according to " _The Stone Dogs_ ," the internal political boundaries still exist, i.e. names of US states and the Federal Capital District around New York City.

2: Technical Master Sergeant is a "dead-end" rank, created to retain the senior technically proficient NCOs in the Alliance military at a level superior to Technical Sergeant yet without the same command responsibility as Master Sergeant; often called "Tech Master Sergeant" in speech. Equivalent to an E7 in the OTL US military.

3: The Alliance Air Force saves money by using ill-trained and practically unequipped base personnel on occasional base security duties, hoping that frequent radio check-ins will locate an infiltration so that the "real" base security forces can close in. A proposal to make the unarmed patrols wear "dead-man" transponders was almost fielded, but the risk of the enemy exploiting the system to locate patrols was too high. The Air Force and the other Alliance for Democracy armed forces are briefly discussed in Appendix B.

4: The Alliance uses the metric measurement system, although a few values may still be quoted in the English system, e.g. aircraft altitude in thousands of feet, or submarine depth in fathoms.

5: Denim jeans are popular with youngsters and outdoor workers in the Alliance, but not widely accepted as adult informal wear on Earth, and even less visible off-planet. Alliance civilian male informal attire is buttoned collared shirts, creased pants, and a cap or fedora (hat), often using bright colored patterns. Sneakers are still called "tennis shoes", rare outside sports or youngsters, and by no means specialized as they are in OTL.

6: " _The Stone Dogs_ " has General Nathaniel Stoddard converse with Brigadier Fred Lefarge and then apparently die on April 7, 1998. However, the text following that has earlier dates in March for at least one incident that has to follow in time. Therefore, "April 7" must be an error, and should be at least "February" instead, to give Lefarge time to return to _New America_ before March 31. That one change is easier than fixing all the other "March" events in the book.


	4. Chapter 2: Whenever Two Worlds Collide

Chapter 2: Whenever Two Worlds Collide

 _"Come now, Watkins! It is a maxim of mine that whatever may remain, after all impossibilities have been excluded, and however improbable it appears at first, must be the truth."_

"The Adventure of the Walnut Grove", Sir Thomas C. Doyle, 1893. footnote 1

Base Security Force Headquarters  
Sandia Air Base  
28 March 1998  
1701 hours

"All right, let's hear what you have so far."

"Sir, we've made only a preliminary analysis…"

Major Schottinger's hand-chopping motion halted the young Lieutenant standing before his desk, before he could temporize even further.

"Let's have it, whatever you got. I need some data now!"

"Yes Sir!"

The abashed Lieutenant began his report; the many incredible items about the incident last night made quite a long list. He hadn't known the Brazilian Captain, and the Hispanic Technical Master Sergeant was still recovering from shock footnote 2, but some of the physical evidence was just too strange. Maybe all the work his people did last night and this whole day would work out to his credit. The Major seemed more interested in facts, not in assigning blame. The Lieutenant popped the "Most Secret / Security Forces Only" footnote 3 seal on the thick folder he held, and began reading from the first of several sheets of paper inside.

"Most of the debris within the circular area is from a flight of stairs, but some of it isn't the same as what was on the building originally. The covering on the lowest 3 or 4 of the steps is very different, some kind of non-skid asphalt over wood. Our stairs were just old boards. The remaining paint is a different color than the rest of the stairs, and the metal is a different type. Still steel, but a different thickness and tubular rather than an L shape. If I had to guess, it looks like a modern set of stairs built with safety in mind, compared to the relic from when the building was first constructed that we never replaced."

The Major interrupted "You're not being paid to guess, son, but sounds 'bout right."

The Lieutenant flushed, but continued on. "The concrete inside the circle is a centimeter or so higher than that outside, and shows no cracks like the rest of it does.

"Captain Miraflores was killed instantly by the event, whatever it was. His right hand was apparently holding a hand-held radio near his mouth. The antenna would be over a meter and a half long if fully extended. We found the very top of the antenna inside the circle, cut off as if by a laser. Our initial notice that something had happened was his interrupted transmission to Security HQ. His left arm was apparently outstretched towards the top of the stairs. Tech Master Sergeant Garcia tells us he had been pointing his flashlight at her while she started descending the stairs. It looks like the Captain's right foot extended into the circle, and we've made some interesting conclusions based on what remains of his right leg. The circle on the ground is evidence of a hemisphere about 3 meters across, centered about 10 centimeters above the top of the concrete slab. The noticeable curvature in what's missing from the Captain's leg and arms, assuming…"

The Major interrupted again with "Spare me the gory details."

"Of course, Sir. Anyway, basically whatever was inside that hemisphere at the time of the event just disappeared. Now we have a hemisphere of stuff from somewhere else, including our mystery man. There are no underground cables or pipes running through that particular area, but the concrete looks different between the inside and the outside of the circle so I wouldn't be surprised if that hemisphere was really a sphere that went into the ground as well. Residue at the edge indicates a peak temperature of about 2500 degrees, but over a very small area. Again, similar to a laser.

"To generate the effects we found, you'd have to use a crane or aircar, quickly chop out an entire section of ground with a laser, and replace it with something else. We didn't spot anything like that on the airfield sensors, but we asked Space Force; the orbital sensors did pick up one bright flash of about 1 second duration at the right time and place, but classified it as too small to be even a fission weapon. The theory boys are still arguing about quantum tunneling and rats that are half-dead and half-alive and other strange things footnote 4, but the consensus is that we don't know how it was done. They all do agree that if this is some secret weapon, it isn't very useful or controllable. If the Snakes could do this, they'd sure go after New York first, rather than out here. Uh... Sir."

The Major leaned back, too distracted by thought to notice the late courtesy. "True. But that doesn't mean it hasn't happened elsewhere before, and we didn't notice or somebody's keeping it quiet. Even a weapon that you can't control very well can cause terror if the news gets out. Might be some strange new infiltration technique. Tell me about this mystery man, is he a Draka spy?"

"Well, Sir, we have an identification badge found around his neck with a picture that looks like him without a mustache, different clothes, but wearing what look like the same glasses. Calls him 'Frank J Carson.' Here are enlargements of the front and the back. We're still analyzing the inside of it." The Lieutenant pulled two large photographs from the thick folder, and laid them on the desk before the Major.

"A-F-O-T-E-C? What's this symbol?" The Major sounded out the letters and pointed at one image.

"We can barely read it, Sir, but we think it says 'Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center.' That red thing in the center of the shield is obviously a scale or balance, and the triangles are stylized airplanes with trails behind toward the bottom of the shield. The number there is 1974, probably an organizational establishment date."

"And what's all this on the back?" as the Major waved his hand at the other photograph.

"Close to the kind of language we put on our own badges about losing or misusing, Sir. Except that the numbers and addresses are wrong. And there's no Section 500 or Title 19 in the U.S. legal code; we've got the National Security Act for this sort of thing. Same thing for Kirtland — that's the name of our airfield, not the base. The street address is a real one, but it's a building a block away from the incident site that's used by the Air Force Safety Inspection Office. This string of numbers could be a postal identification code, but it's all numbers, not alternating letters and numbers like ours." footnote 5

"What's that you said about an inside to the badge?"

"Sir, it's much thicker than it needs to be just to have the writing and picture on it. There's an embossed logo in the material on the back, see there. 'Point Checker' and a tiny copyright symbol there, and a serial number and date over here. We used a Roentgen scanner footnote 6 on the badge; it has metallic circuitry inside that responds to an external microwave field by radiating a coded signal on a different frequency. Not a technology we use, but feasible for an automated hands-off access system to secured areas. It's nothing Draka either. They check papers and use guards rather than badges, and nothing like this." footnote 7

"So this **isn't** Draka?"

"No Sir! Not unless they went to a lot of trouble to build a badge none of my guards would accept, using technology neither of us uses, referring to completely phony laws and places."

The Major nodded, sighed, and shoved the photos to one side of the desk surface. "That's the badge, what else do you have?"

"The man had on denim jeans and a leather belt, Sir. Label on the jeans says Levi's. Matches the Levi Strauss Company, but this is a model that they don't make anymore. The button fly 501 was last made sometime in the early 1920s, according to the company. We made some discreet inquiries and told them to keep quiet.

"Black plastic comb in a back pocket, looks exactly like what you can buy in the base Exchange, down to the 'Unbreakable' written on it.

"The badge was around his neck on a thin white flexible plastic strap with a spring-loaded metal clip, also nothing out of the ordinary there.

"The label on the shirt is 'J. Crewe.' There's a hunting outfitter by that name back in New England, but they don't make a shirt in this pattern. From what we told them about the shirt, it's _faux_ hunter _chic_ , not really meant for going out in the woods. Fabric's too thin. They've also been told to keep quiet about our inquiry."

The Lieutenant paused for breath and consulted his list again for the next items.

"Cotton briefs underwear and white cotton socks, nothing unusual about either. No brand name tags to check.

"His shoes are some sort of tennis shoe, but black. Lots of padding inside. Nobody can find any record of this 'Nike' brand or company though. Nike is the Greek goddess of victory, and we used the name on an anti-aircraft missile system forty years ago. Those are the only references we could find.

"The watch says on it that it's a Timex, but this lickin' was just too much for it. We passed it on to the micro-circuitry lab here on base for them to analyze. I specified we needed a preliminary report by 1630, and not to do anything they couldn't undo. Unfortunately, they broke part of the case while opening it, so they still have it. Here are some pictures of the outside and inside though." The Lieutenant pulled several more sheets from his folder, tossed some more photos on the Major's desk, and began summarizing while the Major leafed through the pictures.

"Black leather strap, heavily worn, with a small brass buckle; nothing special. Brass-plated case with some dirt and minor dents, glass covering the hands and digital display has a few scratches. The watch runs on a small lithium battery, which still had power, but has numbers on it that don't correspond to the batteries of similar size used by us or the Snakes. The timekeeping mechanism is a quartz crystal, nothing out of the ordinary there. The face has standard hour, minute and second 'hands' and a small monocolor crystal sandwich digital display. They think they figured out what all the buttons do through trial and error; so far nothing really out of the ordinary, no hidden communications or data storage functions. Combinations of buttons access a second time zone, military or AM/PM display, a daily alarm, a beep at the start of each hour, the day and date, and a stopwatch function. One thing the lab was very interested in is the hmm... don't know how to pronounce this, but I'll guess 'In-dee-glow', marking on the face. The top left button makes a dim blue-green glow on the watch face for a few seconds when you press it. The Timex Company actually has something like that, they said something about Orca team footnote 8 watches, but they haven't released it to the general public yet. The circuitry is rather crude, but you don't need much for a watch. There's a small comp chip that seems to do all the work inside; it's doped silicon and copper, no exotic materials, so it looks like an old technology or a cheap mass-produced item. But again, only a little like what Timex makes or ever has made. At first glance, it looks completely normal though. Oh, one last thing Sir. The time on it was almost 12 hours slow compared to ours, and was March 27th when we first saw it, so right now it would show about 0515 hours on March 28 if it were still working. Although they aren't synchronized by the internal workings, the hands and digital display were set for the same time within about two tenths of a second."

"Anything else?"

The Lieutenant shuffled some papers and started up again, "We gave his glasses to the optics lab, same protocol as the watch. There's a photo-reactive chemical layered on the lens, so they get darker several seconds after being exposed to bright light. They clear to a sort of beige color when the light is removed, much slower than the darkening. This stuff also responds to temperature; you get some strange effects if you put cold water on them in bright light. We only recently found that photo-reactive effect by accident footnote 9, and use on prescription glasses is still a year away, just house windows for now. We've had laser-reactive coatings on helmet faceplates and aircraft canopies for over 20 years, but nobody was interested in chemicals that worked at lower power levels. Sergeant Garcia mentioned that when she first saw him, his glasses were all dark then became clear, but there was a bright flash associated with the event that may have caused that. These are prescription lenses, different corrections on each side. If these are indeed his glasses, he's nearsighted with the left eye worse than the right. Very light materials used, and springs on the hinges so you can nearly bend the frame in half and it'll bounce right back. Probably took a couple of days and a lot of money to make these. But they show a lot of wear and grime and scratches.

"Three pills wrapped up in tissue paper were in his shirt pocket. The base hospital analyzed them and reports that those are some strong pain relievers and muscle relaxants there. The pill shapes are wrong, but the chemical analysis shows dosages similar to those a doctor can prescribe for muscle spasms or other pain. Unfortunately, the pills were destroyed during analysis, but we have pictures and a chemical breakdown for them, and can easily supply substitutes if necessary. We've got him heavily sedated and taking antibacterials, also restrained and under guard in a private room under isolation protocols right now. He seemed to be having back pain, and apparently just caught several kinds of airborne infections, so it seemed the best place until we could figure out what to do with him.

The Lieutenant paused for breath, then continued, "There's one more little surprise he was carrying too; the coins in his pants pocket."

"What about them?"

The Lieutenant put some more pictures on the desk for the Major to look at, followed by several small clear plastic bags, each containing a coin. "Well, Sir, the coins all say 'United States of America,' and stuff like 'Liberty' and 'E Pluribus Unum,' but the designs and faces aren't right. Looks like Washington on the face of the quarter dollar, here. There's Jefferson and a building labeled Monticello on the five-cent piece. The other coins, we have no clue who the faces are. They're dated 1979 through 1998, most of them have a tiny capital D near the date, a few have a P, and one has nothing. One of our people who's a coin collector thinks those letters are markings designating which specific mint made the coins; the United States used to do that before we unified the currency." footnote 10

The Major handled the coins through the plastic for a few seconds, and pushed the enlarged view prints around while he leaned closer to examine them. Then he straightened up and barked "No other ID?"

"No, Sir. No wallet or pass case. We're running the dental patterns and fingerprints, but nothing matches yet in any of the datastores we can access. No serf tattoo on the neck, or scarring indicating there ever was one. He's got several small scars on his left hand, is circumcised and had some surgery on his nose over a decade ago, but nothing shows up on a Roentgen scan of his body as being out of the ordinary inside. He hasn't been taking care of his teeth lately, but he had a lot of fillings done and probably 'braces' to move his teeth around to correct his bite when he was younger. DNA analysis shows he's definitely human, not New Race, ancestry a mix of Eastern European types, mostly Polish and Ukrainian. footnote 11 Blood tests show effects from a bout of mononucleosis earlier, but no biological agents we can detect. Slightly low whole-body radioactivity count for a native of this area. footnote 12 Out of shape, prematurely gray, in his late 30s. Give him some clothing in the current styles, and he would be a man on the street. Except that he was found on base after curfew."

The Major leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. "Your conclusion?"

The Lieutenant snapped the folder closed, braced to attention and responded. "Sir, we believe this man isn't from the Alliance. And not from the Domination either. There's too much bizarre physical evidence. The Snakes are too smart to plant this kind of phony stuff when they have such good counterfeiters working for them. My team believes he came from some other United States, gives us the creeps. Also, one of my people pointed out that it was a bit chilly last night, and this guy wasn't wearing a jacket or sweater, just that light shirt, and no hat. His watch indicates he somehow came from a different time of day as well. Somebody will sure have a lot of questions to ask him when he wakes up."

The Major thought for a few seconds, "Hmm… Box up all this stuff, and we'll give him and all of it to the OSS. We'll let them figure out who he is. Keep him sedated until they come by to pick up the whole package. Of course, the Sergeant didn't see anything and the Captain just had an unfortunate accident when those old stairs collapsed under her."

"Yes Sir! Stairs collapsed, I'll tell Sergeant Garcia and the Captain's CO. The man and all the stuff to the OSS. How do I call the local field office?"

"You don't. I will. Instruct your people, and the hospital and lab people, to forget this happened once the OSS has him. I don't want anybody outside finding out a man can suddenly appear in the middle of one of our bases, and that the process can kill people it lands on. Last thing we need is another invasion panic. Dismissed."

The Lieutenant saluted and left the Major's office.

Major Schottinger waited a few seconds, then reached for his vidphone. footnote 13 The stranger could stay sedated for a while longer. Let the spooks wring his brain when they got him. A pretty good effort from that Lieutenant. Only one thing he'd forgotten to consider — _where had the pieces from_ this _world gone?_ Well, even the Draka couldn't do much with a hand-held two-way radio, a flashlight and some barbecued pieces of a Brazilian Captain. The Major dredged his memory for the number and innocuous message he was supposed to use to initiate contact with the OSS. Although the Alliance Central Intelligence was supposed to be involved, theoretically this was a military operation on a military installation, and ACI was civilian while OSS wasn't. Plus, the ACI "suits" he had seen all came across as stuck-up paper-pushers with no realistic concept of what they were facing. _Détente_ indeed! Let the OSS tell ACI about this, or keep it under their hat if they liked. Reminded by his train of thought, the Major smiled to himself, then reached inside his uniform beret  footnote 14 for a small slip of paper with a myriad of numbers and passwords written on it. Rules were rules, but some things were too complicated to remember.

OSS Regional Office  
Second sub-basement, Federal Office Building  
Santa Fe, New Mexico  
March 28, 1998  
1740 hours

This stint at the New Mexico state office of the OSS was grating on Randolph Kustaa's nerves. His previous assignment in the field had been a real bear, and this one was supposed to be a chance to rest and recuperate. However, some bureaucratic foul-up had put him in charge of the entire office while the Senior Agent and her deputy were both off for long-term refresher training. All the other agents in the office were either younger than Randy, or just on the useful side of a medical discharge. And he just wasn't the paperwork type. That was the whole purpose of being a field agent — to avoid the paperwork.

Randolph looked Finnish only by virtue of his blonde hair; his face reflected his mother Maila's Filipino heritage more. The surname went back to his grandfather. Even after she remarried, Grandma Aino had insisted on keeping her first husband's surname. It wasn't that she hoped for his return — Chantal LaFarge had described Fred Kustaa's situation when last seen alive as nothing less than dire. He had been surrounded by armed Draka with nothing to protect him but the hand of a Polish nun on a dead-man switch wired to explosives and plutonium. Chantal had gotten out then, one of the concessions extracted from the Draka for not setting off the bomb right away. Since then, there had never been any news. Going by the information that the plantation's bomb shelter had been filled with concrete and then removed soon after that date, odds were that the explosives had gone off in there. Anyone around the bomb that wasn't killed by the blast would have died from the scattered plutonium dust. That had been over 50 years ago. To survive more than a few hours as a known Yankee spy in the Domination was unheard of, and those hours would be very painful, if any Draka Citizens or their Security Directorate were involved.

Randy was the second son of his mother's first marriage. His use of the Kustaa surname was homage to a revered man he had never met, an agent who apparently hadn't survived that long mission in the Domination. One of the OSS agents right after the Eurasian War, who had seen both the battlefields of the Pacific and Europe, and what Draka reign meant to the newly conquered peoples of Europe and Asia. A man who had fought his personal demons back enough to take another trip behind enemy lines. footnote 15 Randolph's birth father, Elias Verken, didn't belong in such august company. By the time Randolph had gotten his mother out when he was 22, Elias had taken to beating her every time he got drunk, which was too often. The confrontation had been succinct.

"Mom's coming with me. I can't let you hurt her anymore."

A bull roar of rage responded, degenerating into sputtering incoherence and wild accusations. "What! You can't tell me what to do with my wife, and you my son! The two of you, you're worthless! I never should have married you! And I should have known _you'd_ betray me, just as bad as your brother…"

When his father had come for him, waving the bottle, Randy had consciously used the drunk's rage against him, and wrenched the bottle away while grabbing the outstretched arm. A careful hold on the arm to force movement in the desired direction, and a pivot, and Elias had crashed into the wall. As he staggered back into the middle of the room, a hand up to his bleeding nose but still looking for a fight, Randy had swept a leg out from under him, to send Elias crashing to the floor in a moaning heap. There were much worse things he could have done; the legacy of unarmed combat training better than a Marine's still fresh in his memory and reflexes from the OSS boot camp less than a year earlier.

He had escorted his mother down the stairs, leaving Elias to sleep off his rage and pain. It was some measure of the goodness of the man while sober that they had never heard from him again. The separation and eventual divorce had been uncontested, probably since Maila hadn't asked for any property or money. There had been too many times when Elias had repented once sober, a model husband and father until his stored-up anger drove him to drink again. Randolph had legally changed his surname to Kustaa a few weeks after leaving. Maila now lived in the state of Philippines with some other relatives, including Grandma Aino. She was better off living out the rest of her days surrounded by loving relatives, even if none of the children there were hers.

A shake of the head, and Randy tried to banish his onrushing thoughts of Roland Verken, his brother, the first son of Elias Verken. An evil boy of the fairest appearance, Rollie had gotten through life using his good looks and silver tongue to get him out of jams on both sides of the law. Eventually, a local gangster down in Chihuahua had taken a shot at the blonde gringo sleeping with one of his women, and no amount of slick talking could have kept Roland out of the morgue. Not a chip off the old block anybody was proud of. Randolph mused, "And what's the difference between you two, huh? Just using your assets for the good guys, that's all."

Randolph was now about the same age that Rollie was when he had died 3 years ago. 25, blonde, but not too handsome to stand out, unless he turned on the charm. Dark eyes a legacy from his mother. A promising OSS Field Agent that had "faced the snake" footnote 16 and survived. Randolph had made it back from a mission that had gone bad in one of the typical ways. A contact turned by the Snakes, a missed rendezvous his only cue to bug out of Nantes to the French coast. A wild ride in a small rubber boat out to the pickup point, the lights of the attack aircars missing him only because he'd thrown the bodies of the two Orpos into a canal and then run the other way to the beach. The terror of watching the searchlights sweep closer and closer as the search radius expanded, hoping that the underwater pinger would summon the retrieval submarine while there was still a chance of getting it and him to safety. There had been cases of the Draka deliberately holding back on capturing an escaping agent, hoping to snag the sub too. Luckily, the diversionary explosions had gone off as timed, pulling the aircars back to the beach to support what was supposed to look like a firefight. The retrieval sub practically sucked him and his little boat underwater; he had been prepared and tied the precious satchel to his waist per instructions. He hoped the contents had been worth blowing two cover identities and the lives of everyone in Emil's network. footnote 17 Apparently it had been enough for a promotion to Field Agent (Grade Two), which wags said was your gift for just getting back alive on the first bad one. Posthumous promotions didn't do much for your career in the OSS.

All this introspection and retrospection had done was delay Randolph's confrontation with the paperwork for a few seconds. The beeping vidphone brought him back to the here and now. A quick glance out from the glassed-in Senior Agent's office confirmed that nobody else could handle this call. Most of the desks in sight were empty, and of the few that were occupied, all had people at them talking on their phones already. Accepting the call, he waited while the phone verified the identity of the caller and negotiated a commercial-grade security protocol. The expected challenge and response to a call on this number were displayed at the bottom of the screen, so even Randy could properly answer the call.

A gruff male voice gave the proper challenge "Ethel's looking for something. Can you help me out?" from a blacked-out screen.

Randy read off "Fred's here. We deliver. What's your problem?"

The screen lit up to show a military officer. "Major Schottinger, Security Force at Sandia Air Base." he rapped out, then stopped as he apparently noticed Randy's unfamiliar face on his screen. "You're not Rosslett!"

"No, Senior Agent Rosslett and her deputy are both out of the office for the next few days. I'm Randolph Kustaa, the agent in charge of this office until they return. Is there something we can do for you?"

The officer seemed unsure, but let out "We need some people from your office to take charge of some evidence and a suspect from an incident here."

Randy glanced at the phone's control panel. It was fitted with a military scrambler in addition to the commercial one.

"You wanna discuss this on a mangler?" footnote 18

"Sure. But you still need to be here. You won't believe it when I tell you…"

The voice trailed off into a wild cacophony of squeals and hums, and the image momentarily tore sideways before being replaced with a black screen and red text reading "ENCRYPTED SIGNAL: INVOKE APPROPRIATE DECIPHERMENT TO CONTINUE COMMUNICATION."

Randy winced at the noise, then punched the military scrambler button to bring the voice back into intelligibility, "... the sooner the better."

"OK, I gotcha now. Tell me why I gotta send people over to your base on a Saturday night, and what we have to take charge of."

Randy began making notes on one of Rosslett's legal pads. It sounded like the Major was still holding back, even on a military-scrambled line. But the need to take a look at this Frank Carson, probably have some long-term interrogation, was obvious. The other physical evidence, that needed to get to the OSS labs, wherever they were. Field Agents didn't need to know exactly where, just that they existed. Three agents and an unmarked airvan footnote 19 should be enough, maybe an ambulance version and some medical people if the suspect was still sedated. A quick hop from Santa Fe down to Albuquerque. Get back East to a safe house, either in the airvan or a tiltrotor, no need to hurry that much or waste the taxpayer's money with a scramjet. Proximity to New York City would help if somebody wanted to come out from Donovan House and see for themselves. A covert extraction, but on friendly territory this time. Randy smiled at the thought of taking charge of this operation, going along for the ride, and dumping the responsibility for the office on the next local in line.

Footnotes:

1: The OTL author of Sherlock Holmes has an analogue in this timeline, but there are noticeable differences in what he wrote. The quote supplied is a paraphrase of several OTL ones and the title is my own invention.

2: "Post-traumatic stress disorder" or "battle shock" is well known in the Alliance, but just referred to as "shock"; the context makes it clear if the trauma is physical or mental.

3: Alliance security classifications are applied on a group inclusion as well as level of secrecy basis, e.g. "Secret / Government Only". After the merger of sovereignty following the Indian Incident, there are no more internal distinctions of nationality like the OTL "US Only" and "US/UK Only" classifications for information releasable only to certain US allies.

4: The quantum paradox known as Schrödinger's Cat in OTL is called Kubbelman's Rat in this timeline, as seen in the beginning of Chapter 16 of " _The Stone Dogs_." In general, the world of the Alliance and Domination usually has theory play catch up to applications, so quantum physics appears to the layman even more like magic than it does in our world.

5: Instead of a 5+4 numeric ZIP code, the Alliance uses a postal code system of alternating numbers and letters. The Domination still uses a multi-line address consisting of province, district, city, and finally plantation or street address for locations on Earth. Off-earth Alliance codes begin with 4, which was set aside as having too many humorous or scatological possibilities when the system was first set up. The Domination uses more specific addresses on off-Earth locations already, e.g. "Luna, Aresopolis, 6Nw0933A", and is considering imposing a postal code similar to the Alliance's, but starting with D and then continuing with alternating numbers and letters.

6: The OTL "X-ray" is named for its (analogue) discoverer on the Alliance/Domination timeline, Roentgen. Therefore, an X-ray machine is called a Roentgen scanner there (roentgenoscope is an archaic term).

7: Although both sides use bar-coded identification tags and scanners, the Domination prefers to have pairs of armed Janissaries at almost all checkpoints, while the Alliance often uses a single soldier after the first layer of security. Only the most secure facilities have unguarded automated checkpoints, and these only after at least two outer levels of manned locations at lower security classifications. Security by obscurity, i.e. an unguarded concealed entrance, is rare given the length of time the Protracted Struggle has continued; eventually any such secret will be discovered and penetrated. (back)

8: The Alliance Navy has a small special-forces organization of "Orca teams", similar to OTL US Navy SEALs. However, the Alliance Orca teams have closed-cycle underwater breathing gear, fully waterproofed weapons, lightly armored wetsuits, and "dry" sensor/comm helmets. There are unconfirmed rumors that the Domination has developed gene-modified porpoises and sharks to perform underwater patrol duties.

9: Many serendipitous technological discoveries on OTL, such as photo-reactive coatings for eyeglasses, or Post-It Notes, were made at very different times on the Alliance/Domination timeline. There was similar exhaustive testing of materials for useful properties, but less basic research and more applied, i.e. looking for something to perform a desired function rather than cataloging the properties in case an application can be found.

10: The Alliance for Democracy has had a joint currency since the Second Treaty of Rio (late 1945), according to " _The Stone Dogs_." This makes any US coin a collector's item and a 1998 quarter-dollar an ahistorical curiosity. Differing physical appearances as the timeline diverged from OTL means that the face of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the American dime is unrecognizable in the Alliance.

11: The Alliance does gene typing as a screening measure to detect New Race Draka infiltrators in the few serfs that trickle in, and determine ethnic makeup when it is closely linked to genetically carried disorders. There is no genetic engineering generally available in the Alliance, although there are rumors that the OSS has dabbled in it for "super agents," and that extremely rich people can go to the Domination to have their children "fixed up." The popular repugnance in the Alliance for biotechnology means that anyone perceived to have been gene-altered would be shunned if not attacked by extremists.

12: Given that there was much higher usage of nuclear weapons in this timeline, both in the close of the Eurasian War, and the Indian Incident, the Earth of the Domination and Alliance has a slightly higher dose of fallout scattered about. Weapons testing is assumed to be less; there are only two powers that do any.

13: The vidphone is a common communications device in the Alliance; a video telephone with crystal sandwich color display, hands-free audio pickup, and at least a commercial-grade encryption device installed. Some expensive models have voice recognition for simple commands.

14: Alliance military officers below General wear berets with service and rank insignia attached, which can be tucked into a shoulder loop when not worn. The hat with "scrambled eggs" on the visor is the sole province of Generals and Admirals in a rear headquarters, or the commanding officer of a surface ship in the Navy. Submariners wear a head covering only during the rare surface excursions during inclement weather. Space Force personnel wear an opaque close-fitting "beanie" with adhesive rank and unit insignia while in the field, which also keeps loose hair out of ventilation systems.

15: This recaps the end of " _Under the Yoke_ " as far as the Alliance knows for certain. Of course, Chantal didn't tell Aino that Marya had passed her microfilm...

16: "Faced the snake" is the equivalent of "seen the elephant," although in the OSS a face-to-face (not necessarily hand-to-hand) encounter with Citizens or Domination armed forces is a requirement for full acceptance in this select unofficial group. Killing an Orpo (Domination Order Police, lightly armed serf policeman) or two hand-to-hand would qualify.

17: The few remaining Resistance networks in Europe are so valuable that sending in an OSS agent to hand-carry out a physical item is extremely rare, more so that the agent survives a Security Directorate operation that captures the entire network.

18: Varying degrees of additional security are available for a vidphone, with the slightly user-unfriendly device requiring the user to decide which ones to invoke to restore a signal encrypted by the other end. The military-grade encryption device is commonly referred to as a "mangler," and uses several stages of analog and digital conversion and operations to make hash out of the audio and video signals; it can take a substantial fraction of a second to synchronize two manglers.

19: The airvan is a larger version of the VTOL ducted-fan "aircar", with an opaque covering for the rear compartment. Military versions have drop-down panels so personnel or equipment can be quickly unloaded. Tiltrotors are used when fuel economy and cargo capacity outranks speed, and when the takeoff or landing field can't handle high-temperature exhaust. With nuclear and fusion reactors in common use, plus solar power beamed down from orbit, and a lower total population on Earth (albeit with a higher average standard of living in the Alliance) there is an abundance of fossil fuels and fast air vehicles for personal and commercial use.


	5. Chapter 3: Ricochet in Time

Chapter 3: Ricochet in Time

" _Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it._ "  
Prof. G. Santayana footnote 1, "PHL 103: Philosophy of Conflict", Alliance Army Officer Academy

OSS Safe House  
Hancock, Vermont  
United States of America  
Alliance for Democracy  
April 21, 1998

"All right, let's go over this again from the American Revolution." She sounded more interested than the last few bored people who had no interest in history or the interesting little differences between her world and Frank's. The sudden attacks of hysteria when Frank realized he wasn't in his own world anymore were coming less often now. But he could still momentarily freeze in shock at finding another trivial difference; like that Otto's was the biggest fast-food chain in the Alliance, and it sold hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos, burritos and beer. footnote 2 She was straightening her pens and paper now, giving him a few seconds before starting with a prepared list of questions.

This had been going on for over two weeks now. After a few days of badgering and good-cop/bad-cop interrogation, somebody high up had apparently given orders to ease off. Now it was just repetition and filling in the blanks. Too bad hypnosis hadn't gotten much, at least nothing they told him about afterward. And they hadn't pumped him full of truth drugs, although who knows what had happened while he was unconscious. At least his back wasn't hurting anymore.

So far, they'd established a history showing that the first noticeable divergence between this "timeline" and Frank's had occurred around the time of the American Revolutionary War. Even with an interest in military history, Frank was only able to recall that South Africa had come under British rule sometime later than 1783. No Boer War, or Anglo–Zulu War and Rorke's Drift here though. No Cecil Rhodes either, at least not the same way. Shaka Zulu never put together a Zulu Nation — the Draka must have rolled over the area before he came to power. "Crown Colony of Drakia" didn't ring a bell for Frank, so both he and they were now reasonably sure that something had happened around the establishment of British rule in southern Africa that had led to his world being different from theirs.

But it was World War II that had fascinated Frank. All those hours of watching black-and-white documentaries on the History Channel, and only the beginning of it matched what had happened here in the Eurasian War. After the Blitzkrieg of Poland and Fall of France, events careened off into nonsense as far as he was concerned. The Adolf Hitler in this world looked completely different. The first time they had showed him a picture, he hadn't known who he was looking at.

The Protracted Struggle since the Eurasian War was a division of the world even more profound than the Cold War. Some of the interviewers actually seemed envious of Frank's Western Bloc vying for the balance of power with the Evil Empire, the non-aligned Third World up for grabs and China biding its time. That reference to Reagan's cliché had made everybody else smile, even if nobody there but Frank knew about "Star Wars," the movie or the orbital defenses. As the century drew to a close, Kremlin-watchers in Frank's America speculated that Gorbachev had avoided a massive collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s only by talking " _glasnost_ " and practicing more repression, an explicitly two-faced variant of Mao's "Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom" campaign earlier in China. What was holding them together in competition with the West's construction of a network of missile-killer satellites was a mystery; probably ignorance at the "man in the street" level of the West's superiority in economy and technology. It couldn't last forever though. An intel briefing that Frank had been to, over a month ago now, had indicated that Muslim/ethnic unrest was rising again in the Caucasus and areas bordering Iran. Gorbachev was probably going to have to send in the troops again, just as he had in Poland to squash Solidarity and bring the Warsaw Pact back into a tight orbit around Moscow. Same old kind of Russian, just younger to start with.

Frank's parents' attitudes about Russians had been born of personal experience. His mother's family had left Poland between the two world wars, from an area now within the Ukraine. His father's story was more complicated, Ukrainians that had fled the Russian Revolution to eventually end up in an ethnic enclave in Belgrade before the next war broke out; those of his family who hadn't been killed by Nazis had ended up in labor camps. After the war, Frank's father had parlayed a pre-war technical education into a living as an architect in Austria, then come to America and brought the remainder of his family over. But when the others still demanded more from him besides passage and initial living expenses in America, he had lost his temper, changed his name from Karzonyk to the more American-sounding Carson, moved from New York City to Connecticut and refused contact with his relatives for several years. His mother's strong hold on her Polish heritage meant that Frank had a Pole's near-instinctive distrust of Germans or Russians, although he couldn't speak more than a few words of her home language. Explaining all this to the interrogators the first few days hadn't been easy, but they seemed to understand fleeing Europe and still having an ethnic grudge. But his parents had insisted that Frank be American, giving him the name Francis John Carson, and only using their barely mutually intelligible European tongues at home for parental arguments.

Frank was now in a world without gray. The Domination and Alliance glared at each other across the borders and up in space with no middle ground. The entire world was one or the other. The knowledge that neither the United States nor Domination had ever lost a war before was no help. He was stuck on one side, the better side as far as his keepers would let him discover. All that they let him find out about the Domination recalled visions of Nazi Germany's Final Solution, just without the ovens and gas chambers. A Master Race living off the labor of billions of European and Asian and African slaves. That they'd taken India in 1976 showed that they were just waiting for any weakness in the Alliance, to drag it down piece by piece or all at once, if the remaining members ever weakened their resolve.

Frank dragged his attention back to the woman facing him from the other side of the kitchen table. The OSS had found that the homey atmosphere in this room worked best at getting Frank's cooperation. There were surely hidden microphones and cameras, but only the one visible agent in the room with him, and he could see another one standing out on the back porch watching the grassy "yard" that suddenly sloped up into dense pine trees. The woman facing him was made up a little, but not too pretty. A stab of guilt at what he was about to think of anyway, while not knowing what was going on with Anne or Nicky…

"He's daydreaming again." Randolph Kustaa stated, looking at Frank Carson's slightly glazed expression in the image on the monitor.

"Ayup, but she's the best we have at getting him to come up with more details. Starting with the Revolution is just to get him thinking about history. It's amazing what little details he keeps coming up with when we get to the 1940s, this World War Two of his." the alienist footnote 3 pointed out.

"So are you convinced yet?"

"He's either the best at a consistent delusion I've ever seen and belongs in a padded cell, or he's a poor bastard a long way from home. But I'm leaning towards the poor bastard hypothesis more and more. He may need a padded cell either way if he keeps reacting so strongly to incidents in daily life that he claims are differences from what he's used to. And that's my professional opinion."

Randolph turned his chair away from the bank of monitors, the big central one set to one of the kitchen cameras. The recorders would get it all anyway; somebody would analyze every vocal nuance and eye movement. With enough time to adjust to the accents, the voice recognition systems were now doing an excellent job of generating a real-time transcript, displayed on a secondary monitor screen. But his nominal second-in-command, an alienist specializing in defector debriefings, remained watching intently, occasionally making comments on a separate audio channel. This was starting to get boring to Randy, even though this wasn't the typical defector debriefing. Not that there were many defectors from the Domination nowadays.

Unfortunately, the problem seemed to be preventing would-be Citizens from taking their knowledge the other way, if they felt they had been mistreated in the Alliance. All the Alliance had to do with some people was appeal to their sense of belonging, their love of freedom for all. But a few didn't have it, just a love of money, or desire for power over others regardless of the cost in human dignity. Randy didn't and couldn't understand such people. They were traitors. Traitors to the whole human race. Randy excluded the Draka from humanity, just as he was able to include all the serfs under the Domination's yoke in with the Alliance in his worldview. Even if he had had to pretend to be a Citizen to perform his missions sometimes, it was with a shrieking desire to kill every one of them always lurking in the back of his mind. The darkness of the room, lit by flickering monitors as they brought up views selected by the comps as worthy of human attention, slipped into a dark night off the coast of France punctuated by searchlights and a repeated hollow sound...

"There, he's doing it again." The alienist's finger tapping on the glass covering brought Kustaa's attention back to the central monitor.

Randy started, then quickly forced himself to stay in the chair as the past was dispelled. "What, daydreaming like me?"

"No, that hesitation. He's being very careful about some subjects. Maybe he really did have a security clearance like he claims. There's a range of subject matter that he just doesn't want to talk about. Mostly military capabilities that don't match ours at all."

"You can tell that from what they're talking about now?"

In the kitchen, Frank and the woman were reviewing a long but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stop a Communist insurgency in eastern Indochina, which Frank called Vietnam.

"It's when he talks about electrodetectors and anti-aircraft missiles mostly. He likes talking about military history, things he said he learned in books and from watching documentaries, but there's stuff he says he knew from his job that he's careful about revealing. The stuff he thinks isn't important is sometimes wildly different from our criteria, like all that about 'hackers' and a perscomp 'virus' yesterday. I wonder what kind of fireworks we'll see when the report with _that_ in it gets read at headquarters."

"You think we should turn up the heat again?"

"Oh, no, no, _no_! In my professional opinion, any kind of strong persuasion would be counter-productive. He's still in a state of shock and denial internally. Little things keep setting him off. His scenario of being in a totally fabricated setting just to extract secrets from him is a little far-fetched, but almost reasonable given the history he's described. I found a reference to 'Potemkin village' in a history of Czarist Russia, rather curious that he believes a bunch of Communists would try to trick an American using one."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Give him what he asked for. A supervised tour of the places he says he knows: his hometown in Connecticut, New York City, Long Island, Albuquerque, and that place in the Mojave Desert." The alienist ticked them off on his fingers.

Randy racked his brain to supply the name, "Um… You mean Crummville. The Navy won't like that. That's their major inland weapons test range."

"Just show him the town, not bring him to a secret weapons test. Remember that he claims to have worked there, but calls it China Lake. What I'm trying to do is trigger some more recall, and get him to accept our world. Either he's going to fall down a screaming loony, or he'll cave in and tell us everything he knows."

Randy sighed. "Odds?"

"Fifty-fifty. Either he will or he won't. You know how the social sciences are." The alienist smirked.

"Well, the alternative is the rubber hoses, and that certainly isn't called for yet. This guy doesn't know _anything_ about the Draka projects we've mentioned."

"You're right. Same reaction to both the real code names and the red herrings, even when we had him hooked up to body response recorders. footnote 4 If he was bringing disinformation, he wasn't given anything we're interested in."

"OK. Let's give Frank a vacation. Give me a few days to set up some escort teams and sweep the locations."

The alienist nodded. "He'll last a bit longer. We're all getting itchy here, but so is he. All he's seen so far is the inside of our tiltrotor, whenever he wasn't sedated. He's probably never been in the Vermont woods in his life. If I were telling the truth about a different history, I'd want to confirm it for myself by visiting places I knew before I really spilled my guts. And if he isn't, I'm sure you action heroes will stop him."

Randy gave him a pained smile, and got up to make some phone calls. This project was starting to get bigger than he could handle. Somebody with a sense of humor in Donovan House had already assigned the code name "HOPSKOTCH" to Frank Carson, and "MAVERICK" to the entire project of finding out how he had gotten here, and if any use could be made of it — probably as a weapon against the Domination, like anything else. Saying MAVERICK did seem to open doors quickly when asking for things from OSS HQ, and if he managed to keep his seat on this bucking bronco, Randy Kustaa might be able to ride it to something useful in his career.

Frank was up early again the next day. Somehow being away from everything he knew as daily life made it easier to sleep, and out here in the woods they encouraged him to go to bed early. No job except full-time talking with a succession of interviewers, and free time devoted to trying to learn more about this strange new world through virtual books and a holographic TV. None of the usual worries, but a whole host of different ones.

He got a mug full of coffee from the pot always on the kitchen stove and walked outside towards the lake. One of the anonymous guards followed at a discreet distance, leaving parallel tracks in the dewy grass. His gun appeared to be an assault rifle with a laser sight, but Frank had been warned not to handle any weapons or risk being shot. The guard was wearing a helmet with sensors and communications gear, and occasionally murmured into a microphone before his mouth while constantly peering about with god-knew-what in his vision.

Nobody had ever asked Frank directly about it, but he _had_ been here before. At least, what looked like here. Back when he was a college student in New York City, attending the prestigious Mechanic's Union. It had been the summer of his freshman year.

That first year of college had been a revelation for Frank. Going in with the pride at being number 3 in the academic standings in the hometown high school, Bishop Carroll, then learning he could essentially get a free ride at the ultra-selective Mechanic's Union. It was the best scholarship offer he had gotten, and he jumped on it. Everybody attending Mechanic's Union paid no tuition, just for books and living expenses. For Frank, that had meant a long train commute every day from Connecticut, rather than finding housing in The City – what lots of people called New York City if they lived nearby and had to go there often. But he had gone from being big fish in a small pond, to plankton in a pond of about the same size, and all the fellow plankton seemed to be "getting it" academically while he wasn't. Going on probation after the disaster of the first semester was Frank's wake-up call. His grades were better in the spring semester, but still in the basement. He was going to spend every minute that he could studying, even during his summer job. The parting words of the probation committee chairman had seared themselves into his memory: "You should spend your summer thinking about how well you're going to do here at Mechanic's in the fall. If you don't do a lot better, we'll give your spot to somebody who meets our high standards."

Working as an electronics counselor was going to be pretty easy for Frank. He already knew a lot of basic electronics at a practical level. The kids were pretty good, and his previous summer jobs had included two years as a day camp counselor-in-training and counselor. The kids were just going to assemble kits anyway. Frank's problems were grasping theory, and his personal life; both were a disaster.

Even with an interest in electronics, Frank had always been impatient to get results, and skipped through the articles about building something until he could find the parts list and wiring diagram. Go out and buy the parts, put 'em together, play with it a bit. Frank knew where to buy things in local shops or the City, how to put them together, and how to make some simple substitutions. But the theory of "why" a circuit worked defeated him. It still did, at Mechanic's, along with calculus and college-level physics and chemistry. There had been signs while still in high school that a reckoning was coming. Once subjects got past simple practical applications, and into theory, Frank started becoming lost. His high standing in the high school graduating class would have been better if his grades hadn't started slipping in the last year, as all the advanced and accelerated classes he was in started getting into college-level material.

Bishop Carroll was an all-male Catholic high school, and Frank was a shy smart kid, a "nerd" in later slang. He was a decently fast runner in grammar school, but not good enough for the high school track team. Too skinny and awkward to play football or even basketball or baseball without getting hurt. He hung out with the other smart kids in the advanced and accelerated classes, and had managed to avoid both being beaten up by the jocks, or assaulted by the fags. Most days he scurried right home to do his homework, except when there was marching or concert band practice where he played the only glockenspiel – that rack of metal bars you hit with a mallet. The only girls Frank got to see were those imported from the nearby public schools, who were cheerleaders or "flags" with the marching band. It was his bad luck to live in a neighborhood with no girls within 5 years of his age. And even though Frank had been in the band all 4 years, they didn't allow mixing with the girls at practices. The girls even had a separate bus when the band went to parades or away games for the football team. Frank would later joke that his dad had gone to more high school dances, doing his bit for the Parent's Council as a chaperone, than he had. Frank had ignored the prom. He simply didn't know any girls that he could invite.

Some of that changed when Frank got the job as electronics counselor for Camp Teeloswago. The owners lived in Connecticut most of the year, only a few miles from Frank's house. They spent the summer months up in Vermont, running the camp. It was mostly for spoiled _nouveau-riche_ kids, with a few charity cases thrown in when the owners could afford it. Sleep-away camp for 8 weeks. Not much different from the camp Frank had gone to twice as a camper about 9 years earlier. But this time Frank was a counselor, and he had to watch the kids in a cabin when he wasn't teaching them how to solder without burning holes in each other. Another big difference was that as a camper, Frank had been 10 and 11 years old, and more concerned with shooting a rifle at a paper target than even looking at girls. This time, there were girl campers in the same camp, not across the lake, and therefore female counselors, some of whom were sure to be around his age. Frank hadn't been sure about calling them "girls" or "women" at first. And especially not some of the other dirty names he'd heard…

This place, it had to be the same. The trees and the lake, they looked just like Camp Teeloswago. The buildings were different though. Instead of log cabins tucked under large pine trees in the flat part of the narrow valley, and a large main house serving as the dining hall and kitchen, there was just the one large lodge house. No rifle range, no stables, no row of rowboats and canoes. No barn-like building where he had a room for electronics.

That barn, right next to the stables, had been where Frank had lost his virginity to Linda. To this day, Frank wasn't sure what had lured Linda into sleeping with him: attraction or pity. The other counselors for Frank's cabin had heard about his lack of experience, candor brought on by drinking cheap wine on a night off duty. They had told him to seek out Linda, said she had "put out" for Andy last year. Frank had broken through his shyness at the camp, figuring that nobody there knew him, so he could be more extroverted and make friends if it was only for 8 weeks. He tried his new-found charm on Linda. It had worked somehow. Linda usually brought along her fat friend Eleanor though, forcing Frank to find ways to ditch her. The time they had bicycled to the next town on a day off, they had actually managed to lose Eleanor for a while. Frank actually thought he was getting somewhere with Linda in the grass by the side of the road until Eleanor had showed up again, hitching a ride after her bicycle had broken. Frank's disappointment had somehow convinced Linda to get together that night, the First Time in Frank's book.

The lake was the same, and the name of the closest village, Hancock. And the bigger town down the road through the hills, Middlebury. But much of the rest was different.

Frank walked to the edge of the water, the still surface reflecting a perfect inverse of the surrounding hills in the early morning light. The sun wouldn't rise over the hills for several hours yet, but it colored the sky. Frank put the coffee mug down on the narrow sandy lake shore, then raised his arms and prepared to scream, as loud and as long as he could. Maybe letting out his anguish would fix things. "Primal Scream therapy," he'd heard it called. A slight cough from the guard made him stop.

"Not going swimming, are you?"

"Uh… No. Just stretching." Embarrassed, Frank made a production of swinging his arms back and forth. He grinned sheepishly, picked up the coffee mug, and started walking back to the house energetically. The chill of the morning was seeping into his clothes now. He'd been here in June through August as a camp counselor, and there had been a thin sheet of ice on the edge of the stream feeding the lake one morning back then. Now in mid-April, it was definitely freezing overnight, and cold late into the day. During the summer, the camp had even set up their own time zone because the sun took so long to climb over the steep hillside on the south side of the narrow east-west valley.

There was just no safe way to release the tension he was feeling. All these eyes on him, the cameras that he was sure were there, all the questions. Screaming out loud might help, but it was sure to bring lots of people running and even more questions. Couldn't they see he was reaching his limits? Even without rubber hoses or other overt physical torture, they were bringing him close to a breaking point. If they were Russians, they were either being very bold or very stupid by bringing him to a place he recognized. Soon after arrival, before they had begun exhaustively covering his entire life, he had recognized the place but not the building, and told a little lie. He had simply told them he had worked two summers at one camp, instead of one each at two. Would they figure it out? Not if he kept sticking to his story. Although how they seemed to know nothing about his life bothered him. They were good at confirming and trying to hold him to what he'd told them earlier, but never volunteered anything he hadn't told them already. It was just inconceivable that a bunch of Russians, all speaking English with such good American accents, could have bought a summer camp and removed all the buildings and facilities he had known without leaving a trace.

What if this wasn't really Hancock, Vermont, U. S. of A.? What if it was somewhere in Russia? He knew nothing of his trip here, still under sedation. They said he had been flown here in a tiltrotor. The first military ones were still in operational testing for the Air Force where Frank had come from, although the Marines and Navy already had a few in service. But there were no civilian ones that he had ever heard of besides for flight testing. They had let him listen to the radio a few times. He knew it was possible to get AM reception from Boston here, not FM, and he was sure the laws of physics hadn't changed. The radio programs had been full of incomprehensible news items and strange music. The holographic TV was completely alien — his world was still struggling with several incompatible two-dimensional formats and an infant digital high-definition one. The virtual book reader, or reader goggles footnote 5, was a toy on the cutting edge of technology in his world, but apparently a common consumer item here that used cartridges, called dataplaques, instead of wireless or even wired downloads. They had even said, when they thought he hadn't heard, to keep the Snake ones away from him, implying that there were some enemy materials kept in the safe house so defectors wouldn't get too homesick. His inquiries about an Internet had produced blank stares or laughter, with dismissals that sounded like paranoid security run amok. All consistent, but not like anything from his world.

Some of their questions had been about what sounded like classified project names to him, "Stone Dogs" and "New America" in particular. But aside from that, the words had meant nothing to him. And without equipment or training, he couldn't be sure, but none of the people questioning him had noticeably responded or ever followed up when he had thrown out project names he knew like "Timber Morion" and "Jovial Consul," footnote 6 things he was sure Russians would have at least returned to eventually. Either those highly classified projects were already an open book to these people, or they had a totally different agenda.

What if all this were real, then? Even if nobody knew how he got here, including himself, there were amazing opportunities for a clever man. All the things that nobody had thought of here. Could he become rich selling off his knowledge of another history? Or the music or literature or technology that hadn't been created in this world? But wait; there were two sides here. Was the Alliance the best place for him to be? And did he have a choice?

His head swirling with questions more piercing than the usual OSS interrogation, Frank trudged back to the house, retracing his steps across the grass. Beyond the trees, a cock crowed at the farm further down the road to Middlebury. Another day, more questions from within and expecting more from the outside.

"No, no, NO! Impossible! There's no way it could have happened like that!" The bearded man behind the desk bellowed, shook his head violently, and put his hands up to his ears as if to ward off further heresy. "There is no conceivable way that a retired sports player could provoke such civil unrest in a major city of the United States only a few years ago!" footnote 7

From his chair facing the desk, Frank drawled "Listen, Professor, I lived through it. I know what I saw."

"Ach, you're wasting my time! You're obviously a madman, and I never should have let the university talk me into coming out here..." The sociology professor stood up, and began collecting his books and papers. His interview with Frank had swiftly degenerated, as he had come in wanting to prove a theory that a more democratic United States would have had fewer postwar problems with racism than the Alliance. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened, but most of the visitors had held themselves in check much better, apparently briefed to restrain their disbelief of Frank's recollection of history.

Frank threw "Fine with me, buddy!" at the professor's back, as the portly academic tried to flee the study without dropping his documents. Frank settled back in the armchair facing the desk that the departing visitor had barricaded himself behind. An obnoxious and obvious power play, as most of the previous visitors had been willing to conduct their interviews either in the kitchen or other similar casual settings. No walking in the woods or sitting on the porch though, apparently the guards felt somebody could have the lodge under surveillance, so anything said outside must be carefully considered. Frank tried to relax in the chair, but he could hear the professor yelling at somebody in another room about going back to civilization. This interview had been scheduled for the entire morning, and it had apparently ended over 2 hours early. If the guy wasn't calmed down, it looked like Frank would get some rare daylight free time. Two hours, that should be plenty of time to climb up to the top of the southern ridge and back, if they let him; it was a steep 300 feet or so, but with lots of trees and rocks for hand holds. Frank had never climbed more than a few yards up the hill while here as a counselor, had never seen what the camp looked like spread out below. The good food and exercise in the well-equipped gym – likely set up for both the agents and the Draka who were known fitness fanatics – had certainly reduced his tummy since he had arrived, and the activity had probably kept his tension at a tolerable level. He really wanted to see how good a shape he was in now, and a hill climb would be just the thing. Jogging up and down the access road, as far as they let him go, was starting to get old. And he needed to burn off some energy now, that guy had made him a little mad. Judging from the yelling he still heard coming from somewhere else in the building, the feeling had been mutual.

15 minutes later, Frank stopped his progress only a few yards short of the edge of the flat meadow on the south side of the safe house, after his guard said "Hold it a sec, sir." Shifting the knapsack containing some food, drink, and other day-hiking supplies that could be rustled up on short notice, Frank felt he was prepared to climb the short but steep slope of the south ridge that still blocked sunlight from getting down into most of the narrow valley. He looked back at the guard trailing behind to his left, who nodded after apparently seeing nothing amiss in the trees rising before them. Frank had been given an obnoxiously bright yellow jacket with silvery-white reflective stripes, which he suspected had a homing device concealed within as well, and a matching knapsack for his supplies. The anonymous male guard was, as always, in an active camouflage outfit that could be difficult to spot against many backgrounds. But the matte black helmet with opaque visor that he wore spoiled the effect, as did the imposing weapon he carried at the ready. Frank didn't know what the guards' names were, and had been discouraged from asking. At least they didn't treat him like a prisoner, but acted more like they were bodyguards, yet uncomfortable at it. He suspected that if he had been a defecting Citizen, there would have been several guards at all times rather than one, with a lot more attention on making sure he didn't try to run away. Well, this trip outside wasn't running, just hiking, and all within the property's boundaries; those extended beyond the top of the ridge above to keep prying eyes away. Although surprised by Frank's request to hike to the top of the ridge, the speed with which the staff in the house had produced the needed equipment implied that it was a common request from the previous guests. But Frank shuddered again at the thought of how quickly a Domination Citizen of his age was expected to climb this hill. He was also profoundly grateful they had removed the lead "training" weights from the knapsack. With it now at a more comfortable position on his shoulders, Frank began trudging up the slope. He planned to climb to the top before lunch, eat at the top, and then climb back down in an hour or so — a deliberately slow pace on the way back to avoid an accident.

Rynn Wartock lowered the sensor goggles from before her face, and pressed the stud to turn off the recording function. While not as capable as a military-grade sensor helmet, this Citizen-grade item incorporating some refinements inspired by the most recent Alliance military issue was invaluable for hunting bushmen or, in this case, traitors. The Domination's LEO battlestations had spotted elevated activity levels here at the Hancock safe house; mostly extra aircars parked outside and tracks in the wet early morning grass. As the junior _Krypteria_ operative in the Boston consulate, she had gotten the dirty end of the stick. So here she was in Vermont to get a ground-level report on the house. Presumably there were other operatives out at similar locations across the Alliance, but she had no need to know about those, all to make a preliminary determination where Maxine Moorehead was. The renowned Draka researcher on primate physiology had supposedly died several weeks ago in an aircar crash deep in the Amazon while on a permitted scientific expedition. But the Security Directorate was claiming that the remains handed over by the Alliance didn't match the stored genotypes, and some paranoid headhunter (a redundancy? — Rynn grinned) had invoked a standing "deny to the enemy" directive. Why the Alliance might want a monkey body expert was beyond Rynn, but if somebody in Skull House thought Maxine was important enough, or knew something important, orders were orders. So, all the known active OSS safe houses were being investigated; if Maxine's presence were confirmed, then a strike team would come in to do the _real_ dirty work. Rynn's job was just to observe and report back, not too illegal. Although her trespass through the sensors at the property boundary would already qualify as a crime, albeit of the most minor sort for a field operative.

The view from this location was sub-optimal, but the best she could do with a good chance of staying undetected by their active sensors. Some of the activity below was blocked by the bulk of the house, but she had a wide vista that included the aircar parking area and two of the four obvious exits from the main building. Things had just quieted down. About 10 minutes ago, a fat bearded man had stormed out of the house, berated his driver for not being ready to leave at a moment's notice, and then loudly insisted on trying to drive an aircar out of the parking area on his own. In the process, he had dented several others before finally being persuaded to let the driver do his job. Rynn had been amused and baffled by these events, convinced that it was all a diversion, and had missed much of the action while scanning everywhere else in view to see what she wasn't supposed to be looking at instead. She hadn't found anything, and regretted not being sent here with a partner, so one could have watched the show while another looked for the "real" action. Several people were still outside working on the other aircars after the first had left, doing various static tests to ensure there was only easily bandaged cosmetic damage, nothing structural or affecting systems operation. Rynn settled into a less uncomfortable position just below the treetop, and commanded her body into the "watchful waiting" her _agoge_ instructors had awakened from her soon after puberty. Directing her senses to rouse her if the situation below noticeably changed, she reduced her metabolism (and vulnerability to detection) to a fraction of even human norm, and freed her mind to wander between her ears.

As the daughter of a Faraday Combine factory administrator, Rynn was well acquainted with the potential of hidden damage. Although the Security Directorate and the Combine's own security force tried to emphasize the punishment while concealing the methods of both sabotage detection and sabotage itself, it seemed there was a new ring of saboteurs discovered at the Darmstadt complex every year since the 1960s. Before that, it had been even worse, and the reprisals widespread. Automated inspection of all outgoing products was only recently reliable enough to serve as a final check; placing deliberately damaged items before the serf inspectors hadn't worked to the standards of perfection that sophisticated electronic equipment demanded. It was so easy for a serf to kink a wiring harness, or leave a greasy fingerprint on a metal contact, either accidentally or deliberately, and lower the reliability or service life of an item like her sensor goggles. So far, redesigning the production process to make it serf-proof was an expensive and continuing struggle, but the best thing short of de-serfing the factories or chemo-conditioning them all, that the Domination could do within the current state of affairs. The Militants were right; breeding a new race of serfs had to be the answer. A serf compliant to the wishes of every Citizen without complaint, and to whom the thought of sabotage or any rebellion would be either inconceivable or unshakable anathema. Even the current Archon seemed to go along with the Militant platform here. He had always decried the wrecks that chemo-conditioning made of serfs. In a recent speech to the Assembly he had challenged the Citizenry to match themselves against the challenges of the serfs and the Alliance. Rather that than turning the serfs into mindless zombies, or the Alliance (and probably the entire world) into glowing slag, out of childish frustration at not having their own way immediately. Even though, as Eric von Shrakenberg himself knew full well, this Protracted Struggle had gone on more than 50 years, not a short time even compared to the span since the land-takin'. To compare the conquerors of more than half the world, and much of the territory off-planet, to children — that was a dangerous thing to do. But he was the Commander of the Destiny of the Race, and enough Citizens had turned away from the ravings of the Militants to vote Conservative in the last two elections and keep him firmly in the Archon's office. But all that was a problem for the future, for when the Final War was fought and won. Until then, there was a structural necessity to have a large pool of serfs. There still weren't enough ghouloons, even for the tasks they _could_ do, to close the spectrum of options to the serfs, including Janissary service or less desirable assignments than factory work. A good yet superficial analysis of part of the Domination's situation, she reflected. Suddenly, it had to be folded up and stowed, as a warning blazed across her consciousness.

Renewed activity down below impinged on Rynn's peripheral awareness, jolting her from thoughts of the Domination's problems and glorious future. After a realization that the warning wasn't of something immediately threatening her up in the tree, she damped down the worst of the adrenaline reaction to the stimulus. Sluggishly at first, she raised the goggles back up, verified they were in passive-only mode, and began recording again as she peered down slope. There were two men heading across the grass towards the base of the slope. One was obviously a guard, even her goggles mostly defeated by the chameleon suit, but the other was dressed to draw attention, and it took only a little observation to ascertain he wasn't a Citizen. About to put the goggles away again, Rynn paused as a tidbit from a briefing bubbled up from her memory: "The OSS does _some_ things we can take advantage of. Fo' instance, if a traitor to the Race is being harbored at one of their safe houses, they'll often make the traitor wear brightly-colored garments outside, just to make tracking and pursuit easier if the traitor has a change of heart and wants to escape and evade back to us. Makes a strike team's job just a bit easier, don'ya know." That helpful hint now digested, Rynn took another look at the man in the garish yellow and silver jacket. Definitely no Citizen, the face showed none of the hardness of even an Old Race (as the New Race were beginning to call their unmodified progenitors) Draka. A mustache and mixed black and gray hair, but the face too young — she placed him at an unmodified 35 years old.

A passive detector on the goggles whined in her ear, and she carefully ducked below the leaves to avoid the guard's active scanning beam. When she cautiously returned to her viewing, the man in front had obligingly stopped and turned towards the trailing guard for a few seconds until the guard nodded. Rynn then realized that he probably wasn't a serf either. Either he'd never been tattooed under the right ear, or he'd had a _very_ good surgery to remove it, and any scar. Now her curiosity was piqued — a guarded man at an OSS safe house, not Citizen, not serf, yet treated much like a traitor to the Race. That there was only one guard told Rynn a lot; known procedures for Citizens called for at least two at all times while outside. Well, odds were that Maxine Moorehead wasn't here. There were enough OSS safe houses to keep several vacant even if a dozen Citizens "defected" at once, and they would never hide a Citizen and somebody else in the same place. But maybe the mission orders could be bent enough to find out who this man was, as finding somebody else hadn't been anticipated. Rynn watched and memorized his face in the few seconds more that elapsed before the two passed below the edge of the trees in her view. She mused, "from the knapsack and the way the guard acted, they're planning on climbing up this hill." Rynn stowed the goggles again, and began to climb down the tree. She'd have to scout the slope before they reached her, find a way to dispose of the guard without alarming the house, quickly interrogate that strange man, and get away clean. A good combination of several of the field training exercises they'd put her through.

Footnotes:

1: Professor Santayana's students often follow this with "and those who have to repeat it didn't look at the answers," partially referring to his habit of sticking to a limited number of exam questions through the years.

2: "Otto's" sells hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos and burritos, but only locations near military bases or important manufacturing facilities are actually open 24 hours a day. _Obersturmbannfuhrer_ (Lt. Col.) Otto Skorzeny was the founder of Otto's. He received a huge monetary bonus for bringing most of the English-speaking paratroops in German service (the 26th _Fallschirmjaeger_ Regiment of the 9th _Fallschirmjaeger_ Division of the _Luftwaffe_ ) to England in late 1943, and handing them over to the Alliance for Democracy as volunteers for further military service. After Hitler's death, Skorzeny's prior position in the bodyguard was abolished, and the English-speaking unit assembled to operate against the British was almost used to support last-ditch operations against the Domination instead. Otto took the men on a final full-scale training mission to Norway, then personally flew them to northern England instead of returning to Germany. The Alliance couldn't officially use them against the Domination, but the English-speaking Germans were retrained in the Draka dialect and then used in the same disruptive role they played in OTL Battle of the Bulge. The unit was infiltrated into southern France in 1944, served with distinction in Spain as unacknowledged covert agents among the Draka, and were the last non-OSS Alliance personnel opposing the Draka to be evacuated from continental Europe. During a short stay in a minimum-security POW camp in Arizona in 1946, where they were supposedly "de-Nazified", Skorzeny convinced several in his unit to join him in starting a new business concept in postwar America. His chain of gaily-decorated takeout restaurants began selling "fast food" (assembly-line production of a limited menu) to fill the void created by the American woman's continuing presence in the postwar workplace. Hot dogs were originally called frankfurters on the menu, but lingering anti-Nazi sentiment and boycotts by European refugees led to a quiet name change. Burritos and tacos were later added to the menu to appeal to the substantial Hispanic minority in the United States. Otto's now serves other foods as well, but their core of hamburgers, hot dogs and beer is still popular with military personnel and male industrial workers across the Alliance. The _lederhosen_ or frilly dresses worn by counter personnel were changed in the late 1970s to more practical uniforms, but the jolly "Burgermeister" is still the chain's mascot, and the decor and music are still _ersatz_ _Oktoberfest_.

3: In the absence of Sigmund Freud on the Alliance/Domination timeline, doctors that practice psychological analysis and therapy are (still) called "alienists." Most of Freud's concepts are present, just named differently after being developed by a wider consensus of practitioners. There is much less emphasis on the importance of sexual jealousy, but this may be due more to lingering prudishness in the Alliance than rejection of the Oedipal conflict.

4: The widespread use of polygraphs ("lie detectors") and similar medical monitoring equipment in interrogations since the end of the Eurasian War has led to very capable medical sensor suites. These are known as body response recorders when combined with a recording function, although computer-assistance analysis capabilities are available in some advanced ones. In a covert setting, a miniaturized version with reduced capabilities would appear to be a watch, to be unknowingly worn by a subject, with short-range wireless transmission to a receiver/recorder. In the overt realm, the sensors are smaller and lighter than OTL, but rarely wireless. Given decades of experience, both the Domination and Alliance are very adept at interpreting sensor readings from subjects, although the New Race Citizens can often control their responses.

5: In 1998, "reader goggles" are relatively widespread in the Alliance, but only mass-market periodicals and popular books (e.g. "paperbacks") are distributed in that format. To avoid the security and copyright problems inherent in making the cartridges rewritable or programmable at anything less than an authorized factory, a production system similar to perscomp software is used. Only a few hundred "reader cartridge" writers exist in the Alliance, and almost all are set up for mass production. Alliance reader goggles are more utilitarian than Domination models, as they are designed for lowest-cost mass production, but have a wider range of comfort adjustments and include controls for switching languages when the cartridge is bi- or tri-lingual. Alliance and Domination cartridges are not compatible, and rather than market a converter, both sides find it easier to allow the other's product to be used with their cartridges, although imported cartridges are carefully screened.

6: "Timber Morion" and "Jovial Consul" are purely my own invention, any resemblance to actual classified project code names is coincidental.

7: The event referred to is my own invention, based on several OTL events that recently occurred in Los Angeles. An African-American retired basketball player with a second career as a second-rate actor is stopped by the L.A. police for driving slowly and erratically along a freeway shoulder. He is pulled out and beaten when he refuses to leave the vehicle or explain his actions. In the first of several trials linked to the incident, the (all white) officers are all acquitted of police brutality and illegal search & seizure despite a police video recording of the beating and search. A search of the vehicle for drugs had discovered bloody clothing inside linking him to the murder only several hours earlier of his (white) ex-wife and her current (white) boyfriend. L.A.'s African-American community explodes, believing the evidence to be planted and the beating to be police brutality, thanks to a legal defense team exploiting ambiguities in the forensic evidence, mistakes in police procedure and the obvious "race issue." The ensuing riots cause the destruction of much of the low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles through fires, looting, armed street gangs going on rampages including shooting at airliners, and the response of the National Guard and Army after the police are overwhelmed and firefighters refuse to approach the fires without protection.


End file.
